title: A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations.
abstract: Worldwide patterns of genetic variation are driven by human demographic history. Here, we test whether this demographic history has left similar signatures on phonemes-sound units that distinguish meaning between words in languages-to those it has left on genes. We analyze, jointly and in parallel, phoneme inventories from 2,082 worldwide languages and microsatellite polymorphisms from 246 worldwide populations. On a global scale, both genetic distance and phonemic distance between populations are significantly correlated with geographic distance. Geographically close language pairs share significantly more phonemes than distant language pairs, whether or not the languages are closely related. The regional geographic axes of greatest phonemic differentiation correspond to axes of genetic differentiation, suggesting that there is a relationship between human dispersal and linguistic variation. However, the geographic distribution of phoneme inventory sizes does not follow the predictions of a serial founder effect during human expansion out of Africa. Furthermore, although geographically isolated populations lose genetic diversity via genetic drift, phonemes are not subject to drift in the same way: within a given geographic radius, languages that are relatively isolated exhibit more variance in number of phonemes than languages with many neighbors. This finding suggests that relatively isolated languages are more susceptible to phonemic change than languages with many neighbors. Within a language family, phoneme evolution along genetic, geographic, or cognate-based linguistic trees predicts similar ancestral phoneme states to those predicted from ancient sources. More genetic sampling could further elucidate the relative roles of vertical and horizontal transmission in phoneme evolution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and.
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Creanza
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
authors.forename: Merritt
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ruhlen
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Medical Genetics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3E 0J9; and.
authors.forename: Trevor J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Pemberton
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and.
authors.forename: Noah A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Rosenberg
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and mfeldman@stanford.edu sramachandran@brown.edu.
authors.forename: Marcus W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Feldman
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 mfeldman@stanford.edu sramachandran@brown.edu.
authors.forename: Sohini
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ramachandran
mesh_terms: D018703:Founder Effect; D014644:Genetic Variation; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D058974:Phylogeography; D025341:Principal Component Analysis
keywords: cultural evolution; human migration; languages; population genetics