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.
Highlights
How human language began is one of the greatest questions posed to the humankind, to which an answer has yet to be found [1,2,3]
In our recent paper [18], we reported numerical simulations for a phonemic serial founder effect (SFE) model by applying the idea, proposed by Perrault and Mathew [44], that some populations increase the number of phonemes used over time
Atkinson [11] proposed that this could generate a cline of phonemic inventory size, but he did not test his idea using numerical simulations
Summary
How human language began is one of the greatest questions posed to the humankind, to which an answer has yet to be found [1,2,3]. Some authors have argued that principles and processes of genetic evolution (such as migration, population divergence, and drift) are, with appropriate modifications, valid for explaining the evolution and the origin of languages [4,5]. Genetic and linguistic evolution do not inevitably concur [6]. Genomic and archaeological studies have shed light on the spatiotemporal dynamics of modern humans, their origin and patterns of dispersal(s) [7,8]. The study of the origin of language(s), in the field of language evolution, is controversial for the reason that we lack any direct data about the language(s) spoken in such remote times [2,9,10]. South American and Oceanian languages have the smallest inventories [11,12]. Atkinson [11] attempted to connect this observation to the fact that, according to archaeologic
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