Are our languages shaped by the heat in our environments?

An interesting new theory has arisen recently on just how our languages have developed, but could it really be down to the heat of the environment? Take the English language for example, with consonant heavy words such as ‘catchphrase’ in the vocabulary; it comes as no surprise that the language evolved in a cold, open environment. Well at least not to Ian Maddieson, a University of Mexico linguist as he explains how consonants do not translate well in dense forests or mountain ranges. “If you have a lot of tree cover, for example, [sound] will reflect off the surface of leaves and trunks. That will break up the coherence of the transmitted sound.” Although vowel sounds such as “a” and “e” are able to transmit much further through a dense environment, whereas consonant are likely to be drowned out.

Added to the environmental factors, the heat factor could have a hand in shaping how words and sounds travel as in warm climates; the sun creates pockets of warm air that can affect the sound waves. As Maddieson explains “You disrupt the way it was originally produced, and it becomes much harder to recognize what sound it was.”

Maddieson backs up this theory by further illustrating that an open, cooler environment produces a consonant thick language such as the Georgian language whereby on the other hand, compared to a warm, dense ecosystem such as Hawaii a language consisting of very few consonants have occurred. “In a more open, temperate landscape, prairies in the Midwest of the United States [or in Georgia] for example, you wouldn’t have that. So the sound would be transmitted with fewer modifications.”

Tecumseh Fitch, a linguist of the University of Vienna, who was not part of this study, has put forward an argument using bird songs which could relate to human languages developed in forest habitats. Fitch suggests that when a bird in a forest sings “Stree! Stree! Stree!” due to the thick, humid environment, others interpret and learn the song as “Ree! Ree! Ree!” as the “St” has filtered out through the environment.

Fitch, although impressed and intrigued by Maddieson’s hypothesis, proposes that there are too many factors involved in a formation of a language and until more research is carried out it is hard to know exactly, thus the hypothesis remains unproven.

Sean Roberts, a researcher from the Netherlands at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, also not involved in the study champions such research carried out by Maddieson and claims that Maddieson’s hypothesis is just the start of research into how nature shapes our languages. Roberts further concludes that he has found that dry, empty places are unlikely to ever have developed tonal languages such as Mandarin. He even studied decade’s worth of Larry King transcripts, claiming he matched the days for the humidity data and on the dry days, Larry King used more consonants.

A story originally reported on http://www.npr.org

What are your views on this interesting piece of research?