Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

Abstract

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.

Universal and cultural factors shape body part vocabularies

“…One reason for this could be that these languages use shape markers to describe objects or have classifier systems based on shape features. The cultural variation and the interplay between lexicon and grammar could be further analysed with information about the grammatical structures of languages from the Grambank database 21 .…”

Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution

“…An analytical solution that deals with all three interrelated problems of relatedness, proximity and covariation has been successfully applied to cross-cultural analyses (Bromham et al, 2018(Bromham et al, , 2021(Bromham et al, , 2022Hua et al, 2019;Skirgård et al, 2023). Phylospatial analysis that incorporates a covariance matrix for both spatial and phylogenetic distance between observations offers the opportunity to explore patterns in the data (Dinnage et al, 2020;Freckleton & Jetz, 2009;Hua et al, 2019).…”

“…Alternatively, many published studies provide custom code for phylospatial analysis of cross-cultural data (e.g. Bromham et al, 2022;Hua et al, 2019;Skirgård et al, 2023).…”

The importance of worldwide linguistic and cultural diversity for climate change resilience

“…These global approaches strikingly ignore the actual complexity of human societal and cultural diversity, as exemplified by the myriads of local minorities, minority cultures, vernacular languages and subtly differentiated dialects, which, taken together, constitute a significant part of humankind (Díaz et al, 2019). Such a focus on uniformity may reflect limited knowledge on the extent of human linguistic and cultural diversity (Skirgård et al, 2023), underrepresentation of cultural and linguistic diversity in the science community (Couée, 2022;Graves Jr. et al, 2022a, 2022bKonno et al, 2020; Lynch Marks et al, 2023;Smith et al, 2023), or hidden assumptions that sheer technological, socioeconomical and political efficiency should prevail over the complexities of cultural diversity (Amel et al, 2017;Isbell et al, 2017;Ripple et al, 2022). Alternately, environmental studies that take into account the diversity of human cultures (Copete et al, 2023;Díaz et al, 2019;Mistry & Berardi, 2016;Reyes-García et al, 2019) usually emphasise specific cases of emblematic Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in highly-specialized environments.…”