What happens to language when two populations come together? A new study in Science Advances has sought to answer that question with the help of human genetics. In fact, in a first-of-its-kind analysis, researchers have studied how human interactions change language, by looking to the traces of those interactions within our genes.
“By using genetic data as a proxy for past human contact, we were able to get around the problem of missing historical records,” said Anna Graff, a study author and a linguist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, according to a press release. “We could detect over 125 comparable instances of contact across the globe.”
Genetic and Linguistic Exchange
Human populations have come together countless times over the course of history, sometimes in small migrations and occasionally in large ones, including in interactions that are tied to conquest, colonization, and globalization. In many of these encounters, genes are exchanged, as are the traits of the two populations’ languages, such as their sounds, words, and grammar structures, which can be shared between populations through the process of linguistic “borrowing.”
Gaps in the historical record of human encounters have made these linguistic exchanges especially hard to study, however, leaving the patterns of linguistic borrowing relatively unclear.
To eliminate this uncertainty, the authors of the new study harnessed the power of human genes, which record the history of human contact over time. Analyzing the genes of 4,768 individuals from 558 populations alongside the sounds, words, and grammar structures of thousands of languages, the researchers revealed that the amount of linguistic similarity between combining populations has been surprisingly similar all around the world, increasing by about the same amount — around 4 to 9 percent — regardless of the location.
“What surprised us most is that no matter where in the world populations come into contact, their languages become more similar to remarkably consistent extents,” said Chiara Barbieri, another study author and a population geneticist at the University of Cagliari in Italy, according to the release. “Our results show that languages are similarly affected by contact, regardless of its geographic and social scale, showing consistent links between population history and language change.”
Read More: Language Evolves Over Time and Islands Can Drive Linguistic Diversity
Linguistic Borrowing and Similarities
According to the researchers, the amount of linguistic similarity created by contact was comparable, whether the interaction involved populations from one continent or two, for instance, or whether it involved different dynamics of conquest or colonization.
However, while the amount of linguistic borrowing was stable, the similarities themselves were all over the place, with the researchers finding few consistencies among the aspects of language — the sounds, words, and grammar structures — that the connecting populations shared.
“This challenges long-standing assumptions about what makes a linguistic feature more or less borrowable,” said Balthasar Bickel, another study author and a linguist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who also directs the Evolving Language project at the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research, according to the release. “It suggests that the social dynamics of contact, like power imbalances, prestige, and group identity, easily override any constraints previously thought to be at play when people learn a new language and start to borrow from it.”
Not only that; although contact caused the overall similarity of languages to increase, the researchers also identified some cases in which connection caused several linguistic traits to become less similar between languages.
“While contact usually makes languages converge, sometimes it makes them diversify,” Graff said. “Our results suggest that both convergence and divergence are part of the global story of language evolution.”
Ultimately, the researchers say that their work reveals important insights into the transformation of languages from around the world, which will continue to change as more and more connections between populations are built.
“This opens up new ways of understanding how languages evolve through human interaction,” Graff added in the release, stressing the value of this research in untangling the past, present, and future of the world’s languages.
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