Centre for Language and Communication Research
Cardiff University
Phoneme Inventory Size and Demography
James Winters
1 Introduction
It’s long since been established that demography drives evolutionary
processes. Similar attempts are also being made to describe cultural and
linguistic processes by considering the effects of population size and other
demographic variables. Even though these ideas are hardly new, until recently,
there was a ceiling as to the amount of resources one person could draw
upon. In linguistics, this paucity of data is being remedied through the
implementation of large-scale projects, such as WALS, Ethnologue and UPSID,
that bring together a vast body of linguistic fieldwork from around the world.
This poster utilises these new resources to present preliminary work into
the relationship between the phoneme inventory size and its underlying
speaker population.
1.1 Phoneme Inventory Size, Demography, and Utterance
Selection
One explanation for the observed variance in phoneme inventory sizes is
random variation: in other words, chance factors alone account for these
outcomes we see across the world’s languages. Another explanation, and one
that is more congruent with other recent studies, is that demographic factors
influence and shape the trajectory of languages (Lupyan & Dale, 2010). The
question being: is there a correlation between the population size of a
language and its number of phonemes? Despite work suggesting at such as
relationship (e.g. Trudgill, 2004), there is little in the way of empirical evidence
to support such claims. Hay & Bauer (2007) perhaps represent the most
comprehensive attempt at an investigation: reporting a statistical correlation
between the number of speakers and a language’s phoneme inventory.
Using their paper as a springboard, I decided to look at how other
demographic factors might influence the phoneme inventory, namely: area,
population density and the degree of social interconnectedness. The rationale being
that socio-demographic differences in the underlying speaker community will
lead to different levels of within-language variability. Experiments into the
acquisition of phoneme categories suggest that when an infant (or adult) is
exposed to tokens from a particular ―phonetic space in a uni-modal
distribution, they tend to learn this as a single category. When a distribution
over the same phonetic space is bimodal, it is learned as two categories.‖
(ibid). As Pierrehumbert, Beckman & Ladd (2000) note: ―VARIABILITY
CAUSES THE NEED FOR ABSTRACTION‖.
One way of increasing exposure, resulting in denser distributions, is through
increasing the population size. In addition, the density of a population is also
important: as this allows for more stable transmission chains between
speakers. In summary: the larger and denser the speaker population, the
more variation it will produce and be exposed to, and subsequently this will
result in a larger phoneme inventory.
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The figure below highlights how relative differences in the degree of
social interconnectedness will result in decreases or increases in the
amount of within-language speaker variation. More variation
potentially provides a coordination problem for an individual within a
speaker population. One solution is for the language to adapt, through
the selection of utterances on the basis of their learnability, by
increasing the number of phonemes. Of course, there will be other
pressures keeping the phoneme inventory size from becoming
unmanageably large. Abstraction is, after all, cognitively expensive and
a speaker population will want to keep their number of phonemes as
low as possible, without becoming underspecified.
2 Method
The first step was to gather demographic data and segment inventory
data from two sources: Ethnologue and UPSID.
Ethnologue is a great resource for finding out speaker population size and
its geographic spread — from which we can then work out the speaker
density per km². The UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database
(UPSID) contains statistical surveys of the phoneme inventories for 451
world languages. The final number of languages used in my sample was
397. The removal of some languages was based simply on the lack of data
pertaining to geographic spread. Also, in the spirit of openness: some of
the languages, particularly those originating in South America, required
area data from outside of Ethnologue (government surveys etc), and their
reliability may be suspect. In line with Hay & Bauer I also removed any
languages that fell more than four standard deviations from the mean, as
these may exert undue influence on the statistics. In this particular sample
these languages were !Xu (141 phonemes) and Archi (91 phonemes).
Next, I plugged the data into R and used this to perform several
correlations and regressions on speaker size, geographic spread and
speaker density (see §3).
3 Results/Findings
Correlation Results
• Population size and Segment Inventory
Size (rho=.33, p<.0001).
• Geographic Spread and Segment
Inventory (rho=.06, p=.2069).
• Population Density and Segment
Inventory (rho=.38, p<.0001).
• Social Interconnectedness and Segment
Inventory (rho=.39, p<.0001).
As you can see the linear relationship for population/segment (rho=.33) and
density/segment (rho=.38) is highly significant (p<.0001). However, there
appears to be no significant relationship between the geographic spread of
the language (area) and the phoneme inventory size (rho=.06, p=.2069). Each
point corresponds to a language. The red line shows a non-parametric
scatterplot smoother fit through these points (Fox, 2002). To measure the
degree of social interconnectedness (SI) I multiplied both speaker size and
density together and then took the log to limit the effect of outliers. The idea
being that SI is a product of these two variables combined (Lycett & Norton,
2010). Again, this shows a highly significant correlation (rho=.39, p<.0001).
Multiple Regression Results:
• Intercept, Area and Population (p<.0001; R-
Squared (adjusted): 0.132; Deviance explained:
14.2%.
• Statistical significance of each predictor: Area
(F-Value = 40290; p<.0001) and Population (F-
Value = 34364; p<.0001)
With the relationship of segment inventory to area and population appearing
to be non-linear we can also use a Generalised Additive Model (GAM). This
model allows you specify a distribution (in this case a Gaussian), which can
then be viewed with a fitted surface for the additive non-parametric
regression of segment inventory on area and population (see above). The
surface shows more or less what I’d expect on the basis of my social
interconnectedness scale – a large population spread over a small area has a
larger phoneme inventory.
4 Discussion/Summary
The current poster presents some of the early work into examining the
relationship between demography and a language’s phoneme inventory size.
Future work to be done, includes: controlling for the effects of language
families, more fine-grain demographic information, establishing the rate of
change in phoneme inventories, among other factors. Ultimately, I think any
future studies will have to build up a large body of mutually supporting
evidence (through models and experiments) on top of a more rigorous study
of the data.
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