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Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechanism. We show that the decrease of linguistic diversity with distance (from the presumed origin of the expansion) arises under three assumptions, previously introduced by other authors: (i) an accumulation rate for phonemes; (ii) small phonemic inventories for the languages spoken before the out-of-Africa dispersal; (iii) an increase in the phonemic accumulation rate with the number of speakers per unit area. Numerical simulations show that the predictions of the model agree with the observed decrease of linguistic diversity with increasing distance from the most likely origin of the out-of-Africa dispersal. Thus, the proposal that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity is viable, if three strong assumptions are satisfied

This work was supported in part by ICREA (Academia Humanities award to J.F.), MINECO (grants nos. SimulPast-CSD-2010-00034 and FIS-2012-31307) and the Fundacio´n BBVA (grant no. Neodigit-PIN2015E)

Royal Society (Gran Bretanya)

Manager: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Espanya)
Author: Fort, Joaquim
Pérez Losada, Joaquim
Date: 2016 April 27
Abstract: It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechanism. We show that the decrease of linguistic diversity with distance (from the presumed origin of the expansion) arises under three assumptions, previously introduced by other authors: (i) an accumulation rate for phonemes; (ii) small phonemic inventories for the languages spoken before the out-of-Africa dispersal; (iii) an increase in the phonemic accumulation rate with the number of speakers per unit area. Numerical simulations show that the predictions of the model agree with the observed decrease of linguistic diversity with increasing distance from the most likely origin of the out-of-Africa dispersal. Thus, the proposal that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity is viable, if three strong assumptions are satisfied
This work was supported in part by ICREA (Academia Humanities award to J.F.), MINECO (grants nos. SimulPast-CSD-2010-00034 and FIS-2012-31307) and the Fundacio´n BBVA (grant no. Neodigit-PIN2015E)
Format: application/pdf
Document access: http://hdl.handle.net/10256/13439
Language: eng
Publisher: Royal Society (Gran Bretanya)
Collection: info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1098/rsif.2016.0185
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/1742-5689
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/eissn/1742-5662
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MINECO//FIS2012-31307/ES/PROPAGACION DE FRENTES EN SISTEMAS COMPLEJOS MULTIDISCIPLINARES/
Rights: Attribution 3.0 Spain
Rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
Subject: Biologia de sistemes
Systems biology
Biologia computacional
Computational biology
Llenguatge i llengües -- Variació -- Models matemàtics
Language and languages -- Variation -- Mathematical models
Title: Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?
Type: info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Repository: DUGiDocs

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