WIKIMEDIA, GOKIA little time apart—say, on islands, or separated by oceans—can nurture developing languages. Just as animal species grow distinct from one another when physically separated, geographical barriers foster linguistic diversity and variation, according to a recent study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa of the University of Tokyo chose to study the divergence of Japonic languages from one another by comparing variations spoken across the islands, and correlating the extent of differences with geographical factors. They found that geographical proximity—and isolation by the surrounding ocean—explained most of the lexical variation across these languages. “The same factor responsible for much of the biodiversity in the Galápagos Islands is also responsible for the linguistic diversity in the Japanese Islands: the natural oceanic barriers that impede interaction between speech communities,” the authors wrote in their paper.
Adding a complementary perspective to the emergence—and disappearance—of languages, a study published yesterday (September 3) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that nearly 25 percent of the ...
