The Salish languages, a group of 23 languages spoken in northwestern North America, have the broadest range. Speakers of these languages therefore speak softer on average than people who speak other languages.
“There is a clear relationship between the noise amplitude and the mean annual temperature,” lead researcher Soren Wichmann wrote.
However, according to scientists, there are some exceptions. Some languages of Central America and Southeast Asia carry long distances, while being spoken in very warm regions. According to the researchers, you can infer from this that the effect of temperature on the range of language sounds develops over a longer period of time.
The study used a large database to test the effect of climate on language size. This database contains the basic vocabulary for 5,293 languages and is constantly being expanded.
This research is important to gain insight into different societies, and learn more about migration, for example. “If languages adapt to their environments in a slow process that takes thousands of years, they also contain clues about the environment of previous languages,” Wichman explains. Scientists can then reconstruct past processes based on language.
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