Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage

When speakers of different languages are in contact, they often borrow features like sounds, words, or syntactic patterns from one language to the other. However, the lack of historical data has hampered estimation of this effect at a global scale. We overcome this hurdle by using genetic admixture and shared geohistorical location as a proxy for population contact. We find that language pairs whose speaker populations underwent genetic admixture or that are located in the same geohistorical area exhibit notable similar increases in shared linguistic patterns across world regions and different demographic relationships, suggesting a consistent trend in borrowing rates. At the same time, the effect varies strongly across specific linguistic features. This variation is only partly explained by cognitive differences in lifelong learnability and by social functions of signaling assimilation through borrowing, leaving much randomness in which specific features are borrowed. Additionally, we find that, for some features, admixture decreases sharing, likely reflecting signals of divergence (schismogenesis) under contact.

Genetic studies on Native American populations have transformed our understanding of the demographic history of the Americas. However, a region that has not been investigated through ancient genomics so far is Colombia, the entry point into South America. Here, we report genome-wide data of 21 individuals from the Bogotá Altiplano in Colombia between 6000 and 500 years ago. We reveal that preceramic hunter-gatherers represent a previously unknown basal lineage that derives from the initial South American radiation. These hunter-gatherers do not carry differential affinity to ancient North American groups nor contribute genetically to ancient or present-day South American populations. By 2000 years ago, the local genetic ancestry is replaced by populations from Central America associated with the Herrera ceramic complex and survives through the Muisca period despite major cultural changes. These ancient Altiplano individuals show higher affinities to Chibchan speakers from the Isthmus of Panama than to Indigenous Colombians, suggesting a dilution of the Chibchan-related ancestry through subsequent dispersal events.

While it has almost become a truism of comparative linguistics that linguistic diversity is unevently distributed across the globe, the underlying processes are poorly understood up to the present day. Linguists are thus in the embarassing situation that they do not understand significant regularities in the way the objects of their study –languages– pattern. In this essay, I explore three interrelated strands of thought to create a perspective on the question that is different from those explored so far: first, I suggest that instead of looking at present-day levels of diversity statically, we should take an approach that looks into how these distributions were generated. Related to this point and in contradistinction to extant work, second, I advocate an inductive approach which includes qualitative case studies that inform theory-building and allow empirical judgments on the propensity of certain environments to foster the emergence of certain linguistic landscapes. Third, I ponder that, in contrast to the traditional focus of historical linguistics on language diversification and expansion, understanding how the ranges of languages are reduced might be the key missing piece of evidence in a global theory of linguistic diversity and its genesis. This new perspective is also able to address the striking correlation between linguistic and biological diversity, which suggests that the processes that created and maintain both are, on some level, qualitatively similar.

Abstract In recent years, there has been an increased attention and interest in quantitative and statistical models of language contact and language diffusion in space. This article presents an improved model, multivAreate 2, to estimate spatial and contact relations between languages and dialects based on work by Guzmán Naranjo and Mertner ((2022). Estimating areal effects in typology: A case study of african phoneme inventories. Journal of Linguistic Typology 27(2), 455–80) and Ranacher et al. ((2021). Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: A Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 18(181), 1–15). We test our model on three different datasets: Balkans, South America (Ranacher et al. (2021). Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: A Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 18(181), 1–15), and the Americas (Urban et al., (2019). The areal typology of western middle and south america: Towards a comprehensive view. Linguistics 57(6), 1403–63). We show that this new model can address shortcomings found in previous models, and it offers some useful tools for researchers working on contact and areal linguistics.

Tool use and language are highly refined human abilities which may show neural commonalities due to their potential reciprocal interaction during evolution. Recent work provided evidence for shared neural resources between tool use and syntax. However, whether activity within the tool-use network also contributes to semantic neural representations of tool nouns remains untested. To this aim, we identified the tool-use planning network with functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants used pliers. The very same participants underwent a semantic priming task including two categories, tool nouns and animal nouns, to highlight the respective underlying networks. With multivariate analyses of the activation neural patterns, we tested whether activity in tool-use brain clusters takes part in the neural representation of tool nouns as compared with animal nouns. The results revealed that word semantic categories were decoded within the left occipito-temporal cortex activated by preparing to use a tool, with similar patterns of brain activity for words within the same category. In addition, in the same area, neural activations for tool nouns were found to be higher than those for animal nouns. These findings suggest that activity in tool-use related brain areas encodes semantic information separately for tool nouns and animal nouns, thus supporting the embodiment of tool-noun processing in the tool-use sensorimotor network.

Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. Here, we follow up on this lexical research with an experiment with speakers of 28 different spoken languages from 12 different families. Participants were presented with pictures of a jagged line and a straight line and asked to imagine running their finger along each one. They were then played audio recordings of an alveolar trill [r] and an alveolar approximant [l] and asked to match each sound to one of the lines. Participants showed a strong tendency to match [r] with the jagged line and [l] with the straight line, even more consistently than what has been observed for a comparable cross-cultural investigation of the bouba/kiki effect. An analysis of presentation order shows the pattern is strongest for matching [r] to the jagged line, but also very strong for matching [l] to the straight line. While we found this effect with speakers of languages with different phonetic realizations of the rhotic sound, it was weaker for those with a trilled [r] as the primary variant. One interpretation of this finding is that when a sound is used phonologically to make systemic meaning contrasts, its iconic potential may be more limited. Our findings extend our understanding of iconic cross-modal correspondences, highlighting deep-rooted connections between auditory perception and touch/vision.

Abstract Austronesian (AN) is the second-largest language family in the world, particularly widespread in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and Oceania. In Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), groups speaking these languages are concentrated in the highlands of Vietnam. However, our knowledge of the spread of AN-speaking populations in MSEA remains limited; in particular, it is not clear if AN languages were spread by demic or cultural diffusion. In this study, we present and analyze new data consisting of complete mitogenomes from 369 individuals and 847 Y-chromosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 170 individuals from all five Vietnamese Austronesian groups (VN-AN) and five neighboring Vietnamese Austroasiatic groups (VN-AA). We found genetic signals consistent with matrilocality in some, but not all, of the VN-AN groups. Population affinity analyses indicated connections between the AN-speaking Giarai and certain Taiwanese AN groups (Rukai, Paiwan, and Bunun). However, overall, there were closer genetic affinities between VN-AN groups and neighboring VN-AA groups, suggesting language shifts. Our study provides insights into the genetic structure of AN-speaking communities in MSEA, characterized by some contact with Taiwan and language shift in neighboring groups, indicating that the expansion of AN speakers in MSEA was a combination of cultural and demic diffusion.

Abstract This chapter discusses how Maweti–Guaraní languages challenge the definition of major word classes. The relation between major word classes and syntactic/discourse functions is rather flexible throughout this group of languages. The first issue is the blurred distinction between nouns and verbs, as many nouns can function as predicates without any derivational morphology and with almost all the ‘verbal’ morphology. The second issue is the classification of descriptive roots (expressing qualities, i.e. with ‘adjectival’ meaning) as either nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Once we apply clear syntactic and morphological criteria to classify parts of speech, it becomes clear that most Maweti–Guaraní languages have three major lexical word classes, i.e. nouns, verbs, and postpositions, and that these share some morphological and structural properties, involving a much debated ‘relational prefix’. Minor word classes that are often discussed in grammars of Maweti–Guaraní languages are adverbs, ideophones, interjections, and particles.

Resume Les realisations des voyelles nasales ayant un statut de phoneme imposent certaines proprietes a leur entourage tout en connaissant des variations de leur degre de hauteur; par contraste, les voyelles nasalisees recoivent leur proprietes de leur entourage ne varient pas selon la hauteur. L’emergence de voyelles distinctivement nasales en lycien resulte d’un conditionnement pour partie segmental (co-articulation), pour partie syllabique (elimination des codas).

Dans cet article, nous proposons d’explorer, à travers leurs témoignages, des expériences de parents entendants d’enfants sourds face aux multiples normes et discours de la norme auxquels ils ont pu être confrontés. Normes médicales d’un côté, conjuguant certaines valeurs autour de la langue, la communication et la culture, et normes sourdes d’un autre côté, qui exposent et imposent parfois aussi des visions de ce que doit être la communication, l’éducation, la langue et la culture. Pour des parents d’un enfant sourd, à la fois extérieurs aux normes médicales et aux normes sourdes, il apparaît parfois difficile de ne pas se sentir dépossédés de certains choix ou obligés de choisir une option (de communication, de soin, de culture, d’éducation, de langues) contre une autre. Parfois pris en étau entre des normes médicales (détenant un certain pouvoir d’attribution de valeurs) et des normes liées à la culture sourde (issue de l’oppression et de la résistance à une prescription historique de normalisation), certains parents mettent en avant des difficultés à être au centre de luttes de pouvoir qui les dépassent parfois et pourtant les concernent au plus haut point dans leur rôle de parents.