_6e98296023b34dfabc133638c1ef5d32-620x480.jpg "Advances in organoids could transform the treatment of spinal cord and peripheral nerve injuries")
Summary: A new study shows that the genetic evidence of historical contact between populations reveals consistent patterns of language change. When combining genetic data with linguistic databases, researchers found that unrelated languages become 4-9% more similar after human contact.
These exchanges occurred worldwide, both in old migrations and in recent colonial encounters, which emphasizes that social dynamics often cancel linguistic limitations. The findings reveal that contact can promote convergence and divergence, remodeling how we understand the evolution of languages.
Key facts:
Genetics as a tool: more than 125 contact cases of the population through genetic evidence were tracked. Consistent convergence: Languages tend to become 4–9% more similar after contact, regardless of location. Unexpected divergence: in some cases, the groups emphasized the differences, which makes languages less come.
Source: University of Zurich
Throughout human history, there have been many cases in which two populations came into contact, especially in the last thousands of years due to large -scale migrations as a result of conquests, colonialization and, more recently, globalization.
During these meetings, populations not only exchanged genetic material, but also cultural elements.
When populations interact, technologies, beliefs, practices and also, crucial, aspects of language can be taken.
With this, the words or grammatical patterns can be exchanged from one language to another. For example, the English borrowed “sausage” of the French after the Norman conquests, while the French then borrowed “sandwich” from English.
However, studying these linguistic exchanges can be a challenge due to limited historical records of human contacts, especially on a global scale. As a result, our understanding of how languages evolved over time through such interactions remains incomplete.
To address this gap, researchers are now resorting to genetics, which maintains the registration of ancestral contacts.
In this new study, a research group from the University of Zurich is using for the first time genetic evidence of the historical mixture between populations to investigate the effects of contact in language and discover the systemic patterns of language change.
Use of genetics to solve linguistic questions
“By using genetic data such as Proxy for past human contact, we could avoid the problem of missing historical records and we could detect more than 125 comparable contact cases worldwide,” says Ana Graff, the main author of the study and linguist of the University of Zurich.
The multidisciplinary research team combined genetic data of more than 4,700 individuals in 558 populations with two main linguistic databases that classify grammatical, phonological and lexical characteristics in thousands of languages.
They discovered that in cases of genetic contact, there was a greater probability of linguistic exchange in unrelated languages of 4-9%.
“This opens new ways of understanding how languages evolve through human interaction,” adds the researcher.
“What surprised us most is that it does not matter in which part of the world populations come into contact, their languages become more similar to the remarkably consistent extension,” says Chiara Barbieri, author and genetics of the population of the University of Cagliari.
“Genetic contact can involve populations from different continents, for example, in recent colonial situations, or populations of the same continent, for example, during the old Neolithic migrations.
“Our results show that languages are similarly affected by contact, regardless of their geographical and social scale, which show consistent links between the history of the population and the change of language.”
A closer look at the dynamics of language and society
However, although the rates are similar, the specific characteristics behind them differ strongly. While some elements such as the order of the words or the sounds of consonants are easier to transfer, more than other characteristics of grammar or sound, the research equipment did not find consistent principles of loans.
“This challenges long data assumptions about what makes a linguistic characteristic more or less borrowed,” explains Balthasar Bickel, senior author and director of the NCCR evolving language.
“It suggests that the social dynamics of contact, such as imbalances of power, prestige and group identity, easily cancel any restriction that previously thought it was at stake when people learn a new language and begin to borrow from it.”
In some cases, the team even found the opposite of loans: the characteristics become less similar after contact. This phenomenon occurs when groups emphasize linguistic differences to affirm different identities.
“While contact generally causes languages to converge, sometimes it makes them diversify,” says Graff. “Our results suggest that both convergence and divergence are part of the global history of language evolution.”
The findings shed a new light on how we understand the history of the languages of the world and what could be ahead. The contact between populations has long been loss to the loss of language, but this study shows that it can also erode deeper layers of linguistic diversity.
In our increasingly globalized world and in the face of the climatic crisis, the expansions of the use of land and demographic displacements can further intensify these processes, fragmenting the linguistic record of the human past.
On this genetic news and language research
Author: Melanie Nyfeler
Source: University of Zurich
Contact: Melanie Nyfeler – University of Zurich
Image: The image is accredited to Neuroscience News
Original research: closed access.
“Genetic mixing patterns reveal similar indebtedness rates in various language contact scenarios” by Anna Graff et al. Scientific advances
Abstract
Genetic mixing patterns reveal similar indebted rates in various language contact scenarios
When speakers of different languages are in contact, they often take characteristics such as sounds, words or syntactic patterns from one language to another, but the lack of historical data has hindered the estimation of this effect on a global scale.
We leave this impasse through the use of genetic mixture as proxy for population contact.
We found that the pairs of languages whose populations of speakers underwent genetic mixture or that are found in the same geohistoric area share more characteristics than others, which suggests loans.
The effect varies strongly between the characteristics, partly following the expectations of the differences in the learning capacity of a lifetime, responding in part to the differences in social imbalances during contact.
In addition, we find that for some characteristics, the mixture decreases the exchange. This probably reflects the signs of divergence (scismagenesis) under contact.
