I’m having problems conceptually getting my head around the idea that language may have been at its richest, with respect to phonemes (“the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language”) when it was in its earliest stages of development. Is it that as language becomes more and more universal, it becomes more and more abstract and powerful (less noise = more clarity)?
But I think I’m getting it all wrong somehow. The decrease in phonetic diversity occurs with increased distance from a particular region on earth (southwest Africa), not with the passing of time and the increase in cross-cultural communication.
My interpretation is that as a language grows, it diversifies - regional accents, social striations, and so forth. Then a bunch of people with a similar subset of pronunciation (a smaller phonetic range than the sum of all the language’s phonetics) split off, start a new colony which speaks only their dialect, and then that grows. Then the same happens again.
Take English, with 50ish phonemes. If a new planet were colonised with people born and bred in, say, Los Angeles, and left to develop with no contact from Earth, their language would miss a lot of the variation of English as a whole. The “ch” of “loch” and the “hw” of “what” in Scottish English, for example, and a lot of vowel sounds - the clipped ones of RP British English, the longer diphthongs of Alabaman, the long “a” of Australian/Bostonian “car”, all sorts - will disappear without the contact. Say they take 35 of the 50 or so phonemes on offer.
As the society develops over the years, and people identify themselves linguistically, a few more sounds may develop, maybe pushing that up to 38. But the middle-class people of the main city in the colony will use a subset of those, and the miners in the mountains hundreds of miles north will use a different subset. And they’ll be strict about how “our people” talk, some sounds disappearing from certain groups. As an example, until the 17th-18th century it was normal to pronounce “what” as “hwat” in English English - the Scots pronounced it even more gutturally, closer to the ch in “loch”, and often wrote it as “quhat” - but the phoneme had almost completely disappeared by the 19th century outside Scots, Irish and a few colonial dialects.
Now the main city sends another ship off into space to found a new colony, and those main city people will take 31 phonemes with them… and so on. Of course, this has to happen quickly, or the language will grow and develop back to 50 phonemes. Time is a factor. And I would guess cross-cultural communication has to be low (by today’s standards, which it was until less than a century ago) to keep foreign phonemes creeping in.
According to your ideas here, would you theorize that we are at a low point of phonetic diversity that may now start to become more diverse? After all, we’re now living in a time when people can’t just keep moving away to a more isolated place, and cross-cultural communication is quite high.
Certainly for English as a whole, it’s hard to say as it’s the dominant language on the planet. It’s gained a lot already thanks to interactions with other languages - several dialects each of Indian, Caribbean, African, Asian English now exist with millions of speakers each - so the low point would probably have been, maybe, mid-18th century.
So, my handwaviest thoughts on the matter: on the one hand, it may be that the culturally dominant standard forms of English (General American, RP British, Australian around the Pacific) rehomogenise the language via the media; if globalisation succeeds in making the whole world bourgeois, that would probably reduce the social variance.
On the other hand, it could be that the rise of a major competitor language - all eyes on China now, just as it was going to be Japan in the 80s and Russia in the 60s - introduces a new swathe of sounds through interaction. I’m not sure, I can convincingly argue myself out of both hypotheses.
Diversity is not diversity for a speaker, but for the sum of all speakers. It’s not that midwestern farmers will gain new consonants to play with, but maybe the kids in the city will pick up some pidgin slang from the kids of the Chinese businessmen and that could work its way into the lower-class local dialects.
Very interesting article about some very interesting research.
Firstly, there is a vast difference between phonemic diversity and phonetic diversity. Whilst phonemes are the smallest units of sound, phonetics includes all sorts of things - intonation, word stress, connected speech patterns etc.
My guess would be that phonemes get dropped because they are difficult to produce and unecessary. For example, some sub-saharn African languages still have ‘clicks’ in them. Clicks are hardly the least interruptive sound to have in the middle of a sentence! I would guess that phonetic diversity actually remains somewhat constant, but that phonemic diversity is slowly replaced by other phonetic features which enable faster and more flowing conversation, such as words built with consonant clusters, intonation used to suggest tone etc.
As phonetics becomes more advanced, the vast array of phonemes becomes less necessary. Two phonemes reportedly endangered in English are ‘θ’ and ‘ð’ (the th’ in ‘that’ and the ‘th’ in ‘think’). In some accents (e.g. Souther Irish) this sound is already dropped. It is also unecesary for understanding: there’s basically no instance where you can’t replace it with a ‘t’ sound and still be understood. Finally, as its a sound that very few other languages have (especially non european languages), many learners of English struggle with the sound and never manage to master it (bear in mind that more English is spoken everyday in conversations between non native speakers of English than native speakers!). So some people expect the sound to become marginalised over the next few hundred years or so. In English, we have a vast array of phonetic devices available to us, not to mention the fact that the majority of our words are compunds (two or more syllables, comprising of several phonemes), which means we don’t need too many phonemes anymore.
So, like I said, I would expect that phonemic diversity lessens as other pronunciation features become more prominent in new dialects. Thats just a guess, though. The article doesn’t actually gve any information as to why the phonemic diversity lessens, and I don’t have access to the orginal article!
That’s pretty fascinating information, Brevel. Thank you. I’m glad I won’t be around long enough to see those th sounds disappear. I’d miss them!
It seems odd to me, at least at first, that the first phonemes used by man were difficult to produce and unnecessary. I think of the evolution of any conceptual tools as progressing from simpler to more complex. I suppose it’s because the first sounds used to communicate were less abstract and more natural? imitations of environmental sounds for instance?
That might take me a while to read, Liz. These kinds of linguistic subjects aren’t all that familiar to me so it takes a bit more effort. Thanks - it looks very interesting and pertinent.
