A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity based on phonemic loss in low-density populations

Abstract

It has been observed that the number of phonemes in languages in use today tends to decrease with increasing distance from Africa. A previous formal model has recently reproduced the observed cline, but under two strong assumptions. Here we tackle the question of whether an alternative explanation for the worldwide phonemic cline is possible, by using alternative assumptions. The answer is affirmative. We show this by formalizing a proposal, following Atkinson, that this pattern may be due to a repeated bottleneck effect and phonemic loss. In our simulations, low-density populations lose phonemes during the Out-of-Africa dispersal of modern humans. Our results reproduce the observed global cline for the number of phonemes. In addition, we also detect a cline of phonemic diversity and reproduce it using our simulation model. We suggest how future work could determine whether the previous model or the new one (or even a combination of them) is valid. Simulations also show that the clines can still be present even 300 kyr after the Out-of-Africa dispersal, which is contrary to some previous claims which were not supported by numerical simulations.

Extracting hierarchical features of cultural variation using network-based clustering

“…A salient feature of linguistic variation is phonemic variation: variation in the sounds present within languages. Phonemic variation can be used to study inter-language relationships and population migrations ( Atkinson, 2011 ; Creanza et al, 2015 ; Fort & Pérez-Losada, 2016 ; Pérez-Losada & Fort, 2018 ), and for our next example, we analyse hierarchical structure in worldwide phonemic variation.…”

“…migrations (Atkinson, 2011;Creanza et al, 2015;Fort & Pérez-Losada, 2016;Pérez-Losada & Fort, 2018), and for our next example, we analyse hierarchical structure in worldwide phonemic variation. Creanza et al (2015) analysed two databases that have been assembled on phonemes across large numbers of languages.…”

On the Trail of Spatial Patterns of Genetic Variation

“…Genetic clines are often defined as the gradual variation in the frequency of a given genetic marker regarding latitude, longitude, altitude (Roy et al, 2018) or the distance up to an origin (Pérez-Losada & Fort, 2018). In this way, thorough studies of the spatial orientation of clinal genetic variation stand helpful to assist in the interpretation of potential evolutionary forces shaping the gene pool of a species (Kyriacou et al, 2008;Maes & Volckaert, 2002;Razgour, 2015).…”