Article2007

Phoneme inventory size and population size

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Linguistics and language evolution Language and cultural evolution

Abstract

This short report investigates the relationship between population size and phoneme inventory size, and finds a surprisingly robust correlation between the two. The more speakers a language has, the bigger its phoneme inventory is likely to be. We show that this holds for both vowel inventories and consonant inventories. It is not an artifact of language family.

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References

2001Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure 2002Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination 1991Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report 1999Acoustics of children’s speech: Developmental changes of temporal and spectral parameters 2020World Atlas of Language Structures 1993Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. II: The role of phonetic environment and talker variability in learning new perceptual categories 2000Self-organization in vowel systems 2003The Handbook of Language Variation and Change

Cited by

2012Revisiting population size vs. phoneme inventory size 2013Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives 2021Tense–aspect–mood marking, language-family size and the evolution of predication 2020Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO 2016Momentum in Language Change 2017Phoneme inventory size and the transition from monoplanar to dually patterned speech 2021Linguistic Complexity: Relationships Between Phoneme Inventory Size, Syllable Complexity, Word and Clause Length, and Population Size 2021The speakers of minority languages are more multilingual

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