Submitted by Djinn_and_juice t3_1070lih in askscience
That’s a lot in a question and I only sort of think I used all the words correctly, forgive me. I’m wondering if, let’s say, a language formed it’s words and sounds to be whatever they are in a way that reflects the general landscape of the culture they formed in. That could be a stupid question, apologies in advance
> For instance, the broad Australian accent (also called "Ocker"), which is more common in rural areas than metropolitan areas, has a prominent nasal twang and an emphasis on drawn-out long vowels. These characteristics are favourable for carrying over long, open distances with few obstructions. Rural accents in the U.S. exhibit similar adaptations.
My understanding agrees with other commenters in the thread - that there's no demonstrated connection between linguistic features and environment, and that connections like those are just intuited explanations rather than demonstrated scientific conclusions. Do you have a source you can cite for these?
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Two tendencies come to mind:
Phonology is important too, just not something it occurred to me to include. I wonder if there is any link between the development of a language like Xhosa and anything that is region/climate specific. This is a great avenue to go down, thank you
There are some claims that sounds in languages adapt to the environmental conditions (like development of sounds that cary over long distances in rural areas or the paper on tones and humidity mentioned in another post), but I personally remain unconvinced. In my opinion, these results are obtained with too much statistical hand-waving and little actual substance. I've spent quite some time discussing this back and forth with the authors of the climate and tonal languages paper, but hey, science is all about difference of opinions :)
Do you believe there to be no link at all or just nothing warranting discussion without that substance?
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Not OP, but the general opinion in linguistics is I think fairly well reflected by this Language Log post from a good decade ago, in response to a paper about high altitudes correlating with ejectives:
> Still, the (presumably) spurious correlations of the two word-order variables with altitude remind us of the possibility for false findings here. (...)
> Whether or not the altitude/ejective correlation reveals a causal connection, we can expect the near future to bring us a large number of spurious correlational analyses, along with a few meaningful ones. There are three reasons for this:
> (1) The existence of digital datasets makes it increasingly easy to perform quantitative checks on hypotheses about possible relationships between linguistic and non-linguistic variables;
> (2) The astronomically large number of such possible relationships guarantees that many of them should exhibit a strong pair-wise connection by chance, even if all of the distributions were statistically independent;
> (3) The distributions are not statistically independent, due to factors such as cultural and geographical diffusion.
> Note that the "file drawer effect" strongly undermines the often-made argument "But I/we made the hypothesis before we checked, we didn't just dredge for correlations and then try to explain them". The data-dredging (and the associated multiple comparisons) can (and do) occur across many unconnected investigations, with only the "significant" ones getting published.
In short, such correspondences aren't impossible, but it's a lot of effort to show that they're not just random coincidences. Languages are incredibly complex systems, and aren't independent of each other - which makes them extremely difficult to do statistics on. Personally, I think for a lot of purposes (including these) the set of all human languages isn't a statistically significant sample size - the systems are too complex and too interrelated for only seven thousand data points to be anywhere near enough to show clear trends above the background of noise.
There's a hypothesis that mountainous areas tend to preserve isolate languages better, and languages with complex morphology. Examples are Caucasus and the Himalayas. (Compare some languages in the Himalayas with related Tibetan and Mandarin.)
This doesn't mean these languages were formed there, but the isolation preserved some complex features.
(edit) grammar
What about Norwegian and Icelandic though? Norway has very isolated, mountainous pockets like Iceland, and yet Norwegian is at a similar level of complexity as the other continental languages while Icelandic remained more conservative in that respect.
Maybe because Norwegians have traditionally been a sea oriented culture, could that mean they were exposed to other languages more?
Iceland is also very sea oriented. It was a hub for cod and whale fishing by both Norwegian and Portuguese sailors throughout the middle ages and into the modern period. The major language changes that today make Norwegian and Icelandic mutually unintelligible were mostly complete by the 16th century, which is before the period of intense economic and social decline that Iceland experienced in the 17th century onward due to a combination of Danish economic colonialism, waves of black death, and famines caused by volcanic eruptions. I think it would be difficult to argue that remote Norwegian fjords were more remote than Iceland during this time period, or at least not by much.
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Most peoples connected to sea aren't isolated at all, it's much easier to travel over sea than over land. I don't know the precise statistics, I think it's other way round -- morphologically complex and isolated languages tend to be found in mountain areas. I think J. Nichols is the strongest proponent, she has given examples from Caucasus...
I found from my time in Norway that there are many distinct dialect differences that seem to be oriented around the landscape. I'd imagine that the mountainous terrain contributed to some amount of local isolation that fostered these changes in dialect.
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The answer isnt simple. All language reflects the context in which it is used. However there is no 1:1 correlation, nor is there any "correct" way to use a language. Language is formed to attempt communication, but that requires both transmission and reception. Meaning that the meaning of language can change as it is passed between groups or individuals. In order to establish a response to your question about connection, we would have to be able to quantify an "origin" but its incredibly unlikely we'd be able to do that with certainty unless we have extensive written records AND something to compare to. Even then, there is no guarantee that the history is accurate or complete.
Basically, language is constantly changing by the way its used. We can't nail down any particular concept/style as "more" accurate or more true than another. The only difference between a dialect and a language is the army and navy. (meaning its a political difference not a real one)
I like that closing sentence a lot! Interesting, sort of by virtue of being living and evolving it’s harder to nail down any definitive answer on this. Both frustrating and really cool at the same time
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[deleted] t1_j3l0eyx wrote
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