Good morning, Interweb.
Let's Worldbuild!
Different languages sound different, right?
But why is that?
Well, many reasons but what if I told you geography may be important one?
What if I told you the earth itself may influence how human languages sound?!
You'd probably think I'm crazy - trust me you ain't see nothing yet...
Beatboxing - the art of physically assaulting vegetables – at it's core utilizes three
unique sounds: /p'/, /t'/ and /k'/.
Beatboxers call these the bass, hi-hat and snare sounds.
Linguistics, however, call them ejectives.
I'm not going to go into the sound production mechanics here, 'cause it's super dry and
super boring and would involve me using words like stylohyoid and digastric - words that
are entirely too nerdy...even for me.
Instead, let's turn to the fine city of Topeka, Kansas.
Only let's hold our breaths and without exhaling pronounce the word Topeka, placing particular
emphasis on each consonant.
Ready?
Here we go...Ta-Pi-Ka.
Ta-Pi-Ka.
Ta-Pi-Ka
There you have it three eloquently engineered ejectives.
Fun game: go through the regular pulmonic consonants and see which of them can be “ejectivized”
using this method.
Some will be easy, others will be difficult and others still will be impossible...give
it a try and let me know in comments why you think that is?
Now, despite being utilized by 100% of beatboxers, ejectives only feature in about 20% of the
world's languages: the Quecha word for clothes is “p'atcha”.
The Kabardian word from ram is “t'uh”.
The Hausa word for effort is “k'o:k'a_rih”...and so on.
If we plot all ejective languages on a world map, we get something that looks a little
like this.
Pretty random, right?
Wrong!
Noticeable clustering is evident in several locations.
But what's really surprising is that this clustering correlates, almost perfectly, with
5 of the world's 6 major high altitude regions: the North American cordillera, the Andes,
the South African Plateau, the East African Rift and the Caucasus.
The linguist Dr. Caleb Everett suggests that this correlation is direct evidence supporting
the notion that geography can drive language evolution.
The idea being that the decreased air pressure at high elevation makes ejectives easier to
produce: the force required to produce an ejective, like /k'/ at an altitude of 2500
m is 26% less than at sea level.
Additionally, he theorizes that ejective may help reduce water vapor loss.
Humans typically lose about 300-400ml of water vapor daily through exhaled breath.
But ejectives don't require exhalation - remember they are NON-pulmonic sounds – we can produce
them with our breaths held.
Reduce the amount you exhale whilst speaking and you reduce your water vapor loss, which
would help combat dehydration and altitude sickness.
All pretty advantageous stuff if you live high in the mountains.
Now, to be clear, it's not like if you moved from the suburbs to the summit of Everest
you'd suddenly start sp'eak'ing wit' ej'ect'ives.
Rather high altitude languages may just be more likely to develop, and hold on to, ejective
sounds.
Now, Everett certainly isn't the only one who has studied such linguistic correlations.
Papers have been written linking temperature, humidity, mountainous regions and even plant
cover to aspects of language such as sonority and tone.
Sonority, by the way, is just a measure of the loudness of a sound.
Vowels tend to be louder than voiceless plosives and a general hierarchy, at least for English,
looks something like this.
Loud to soft.
These studies have shown that languages native to warm regions tended to be overall more
sonorous than those native to cold regions.
Warm equals louder; cold equals softer.
The justification being that people in warm climates spend more time outside and so have
a greater need to communicate at a distance.
The louder a speech segment is the more audible it is at a distance thus it is advantageous
for warm climate languages to trend towards increased sonority.
People in cold climates, especially cold mountainous regions, have to contend with freezing temperatures
and wind chill.
Louder, more sonorous, sounds require a speaker to open they're mouth more - compare /a/ and
/i/.
In general, the less of your insides you expose to the cold the better, so lowering the overall
sonority, in these cases, is a good thing.
Dense plant cover in warm regions results in people communicating at shorter distances
so here we a trend towards decreased sonority.
In cold regions, dense vegetation has the opposite effect: it reduces wind chill so
we see an increase in sonority.
Now, humidity comes into play with tonal langauges, like Cantonese and Mandarin.
Complex tonal systems require very precise manipulation of the vocal chords.
In cold, dry climates this precision is difficult to achieve – we need a bit of moisture in
the air to lube up those vocal folds and get 'em working at peak efficiency.
As a result, we tend to only find complex tonal languages in and around warm humid regions.
Now, this all sounds awesome but things start to come unravelled when we look at implosives
– the sister sound of ejectives.
If you've ever imitated someone drinking a bottle of water by making a glugging sound
/g''g''g''/ you've come close to producing an implosive.
To a good approximation, if you glug a “b” you'll get a voiced bilabial implosive /b''/.
Glug a “d” and you've a voiced alveolar implosive /d''/.
And so on...
Like before, I'd encourage you to see which of the standard pulmonic consonants can, and
can't, be “implosivized”.
And I encourage you to ask why that is?
Anyways, if we plot all the implosive featuring languages, we again see a lot of clustering,
perhaps even more so than with the ejectives.
And I'm pretty sure, given a free afternoon or two, I could come up with some sort of
correlation to account for this.
And therein lies a fundamental problem with all these studies...correlation does not necessarily
imply causation.
I'm not saying these studies are garbage, or that we should ignore them, or that they
are correct.
Rather it's our job to test the hypotheses put forward in these studies, chuck out the
bad ones, and come up with a good theory that accurately describes the state of the universe.
So, does the earth itself influence how we speak?
Maybe...though a lot more testing is needed.
Now, when it comes to the construction of languages in genre fiction these studies can
be quiet useful - their results could make for some pretty interesting creative constraints.
Like, say you're thinking of shooting an unimaginative re-working of Pocahontas and you want to create
a badass language for your giant smurfs to speak.
Ask yourself what environment will this language be spoken in?
Is altitude a factor?
Temperature?
Plant cover?
Terrain?
Can I use the environment to drive my language construction.
If nothing else these studies, in the context of genre fiction, can, and should, stop people
creating the dreaded “kitchen sink” conlang.
For that alone they have
their value.