They suggest that languages adapt to the characteristics of the environment

2015/11/17 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Eboluzioa
• Anatomia/Fisiologia
• Ekologia

It is known that the singing birds adapt their song to the environment. For example, birds living in the forests tend to sing in frequencies inferior to those of open zones. According to scientists, the reason is that trees make high frequency sounds difficult. Therefore, the birds would adapt the song to combat it.

To find out if something similar happens with human languages, researchers at the University of California and the French Language Dynamics Research Laboratory have analyzed 633 languages from all over the world and their places of origin. English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish have been excluded from this study because they are very widespread outside the geographical scope in which they were created.

The study shows a relationship between the characteristics of places and languages: in tropical forests, low-frequency sounds and words with little consonant are used, while in cold, dry and mountainous places, languages have many consonants. They consider that this difference is related to the ease or difficulty of propagating sounds depending on the place.

However, it is not the first research to show that the environment influences the sound of the language. In fact, at the beginning of the year another study on the relationship between languages and climate was published in the journal PNAS.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Miami and the Max Planck Institute, showed that air humidity influences the vibration of the vocal cords. In view of this, they thought that this could influence the characteristics of languages and, analyzing more than 3,700 languages, affirmed that the languages of the complex tone are of humid climates and that they are not found in dry and cold places. It was concluded that human language, like the sound system of other species, is developed according to the conditions of the environment.