There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language

Abstract

There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language by VLADIMIR PERICLIEV AbstractIn the target article, Trudgill assumes, based on the inspection of some Austronesian/Polynesian languages, that large community size favours mediumsized phonological inventories, whereas small community size favours either small phonological inventories or large inventories, and he then undertakes to explain these "facts". A crosslinguistic empirical test, however, reveals conclusively that such assumptions are invalid and therefore Trudgill's explanation is fallacious in explaining a phenomenon that does not exist.

On phonemic diversity and the origin of language in Africa

“…The intuition behind a similar idea is not new: it was suggested by Trudgill (2004) in the specific form that languages with small populations have either very small or very large inventories, and languages with larger populations favour "medium-sized populations". In testing Trudgill's claim, I showed that this specific correlation does not really hold in a database of 428 languages (Pericliev 2004), but a part of this correlation, pertaining to the favouring of small inventories by small-sized populations, was later shown by Hay & Bauer (2007) to hold statistically, including in my dataset.…”

Revisiting population size vs. phoneme inventory size

“…A third approach to examining the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic factors is to model the relationship statistically. Studies that directly test the relationship between speaker population and phoneme inventory size draw on a variety of sampling and statistical approaches with sometimes contradictory results (Bakker 2004, Pericliev 2004, Donohue & Nichols 2011, Hay & Bauer 2007, Wichmann et al 2011). Bakker's study reexamines Trudgill's claims about the effects of language contact on phonological inventories, whereas Pericliev's PRE-PUBLICATION MANUSCRIPT.…”

Language and genes: A new perspective on the origins of human cultural diversity

“…Trudgill (11) argued in a similar manner, although on slightly different grounds, that small communities are disproportionately likely to have languages with unusually high or unusually low numbers of contrastive sounds. Although the empirical evidence does not appear to support his claim, it does point to interactions between sound repertoire and demography (12,13).…”