Richesse en phonèmes et richesse en locuteurs

Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories

“…The Polynesian languages which we have been focussing on in particular, namely those which have only eight consonants, can be supposed to have been relatively isolated, LOW-contact languages. Haudricourt (1961) attempts an explanation for this. Small inventories, he says, are the result of the impoverishment which occurs in situations characterised by monolingualism and isolation (the opposite of the situation obtaining in the Caucasus) -and/or by non-egalitarian bilingualism.…”

“…The issue of the relationship between societal type and size of phonological inventories (see Trudgill 1998) has been addressed by Haudricourt (1961), who cites the Caucasian language Ubykh, which had a very large phoneme inventory including 78 consonants. He points out that this large-inventory (and now dead) language was spoken by a smaller population in a smaller geographical area than other, related Caucasian languages which had smaller inventories.…”

The co-variation of phonology with morphology and syntax: A hopeful history

“…In actual fact, the size of phoneme Systems has been claimed to correlate with a sociolinguistic variable. According to Haudricourt (1961), phonemes are the more numerous, the more intensively a Speech Community practices "egalitarian bilingualism", with phonemes being prone to get borrowed among the languages in such close contact. In a similar vein, likewise attributing increases in phonemes to borrowing, Trudgill (1997) suggests that small phoneme inventories are characteristic of (i) isolated, lowcontact languages (such äs Hawaiian) and (ii) high-contact languages where contact is short-term and/or involves imperfect language-learning by adults (äs, prototypically, in pidgins), while large phoneme inventories are limited to high-contact language where contact is long-term and involves child-bilingualism (äs in Ubykh).…”

North American Indian Language Contact

“…Haudricourt (1961) hypothesizes that large phoneme inventories, such as are found in languages of the Pacific North-west, are a reflection of extensive 'egalitarian' multilingualism (the Lake Miwok case reported by Callaghan, 1964, is another plausible example). Lamb (1964) argues that pre-Columbian language contact must have already resulted in the extinction of many languages and even whole language families, which are thus unrecoverable by reconstruction; this hypothesis is questioned by C. F. and F. M. Voegelin (1965).…”