Climate Controlled Language

     Today, I tread gingerly into a discussion of the realm of anthropology I know the least about, Biological Anthropology. Biological (or Physical) anthropology is the subfield that looks at human (and near human) biology in order to better understand how we evolved into the beings we are today. It's scope is long reaching and also ties back into the other subfields. One example would be how the biological aspects of our throat and mouth brought about the complexities of language. "Sounds are created by the vibration of an object and transmitted through some medium, which in turn vibrates our eardrum. Brains differentiate, categorize and interpret these vibrations" (Achterberg and Piece 2011). So to create the complex sounds that create language our anatomy had to be very specific and determined.
     Interesting new research suggests that some differences in language creation might be effected by climate. "The theory is that people in warmer climates generally spend more time outdoors and communicate at a distance more often than people in colder climates. It is presumably adaptive in such climates to use syllables and sounds that are more easily heard and recognized" (Ember and Ember 2008). People in colder climates possibly spend more time "huddled together" and thus do not need as distinct or audible syllables and sounds. "Using cross-cultural data from 60 or more societies, Robert Munroe and colleagues (1996) presented evidence that societies in warm to moderate climates have a significantly higher percentage of consonant-vowel syllables in their languages, as compared with societies in colder climates" (Ember and Ember 2008). The higher use of the CV syllable is due to it's more audible quality over distance.
     Sonority is the higher presence of vowels over consonants in syllables. Vowels tend to help with recognizability and audibility. Although many other researchers suggest the warmth of the climate is what effects the sonority level, Ember and Ember (2008) suggest it is actually the coldness of the climate that really matters.

     The scatterplot shows the average sonority scores for the number of cold months given, with areas with more cold months having higher average sonority scores.
Ember and Ember (2008) do respond to additional predictors of sonority. The econiche also has a bearing on the average sonority. For example, communication would be different in a dense tropical forest as opposed to an open field even if their climates were exactly the same. (Ember and Ember 2008). They also suggested that in societies with looser sexual constraints (ie greater frequency of premarital and extramarital sex) there was a greater average sonority despite the climate. They use a box chart to show that climate has less effect in these situations.
     In the end they feel like sonority is definitely influenced, if not completely determined, by climate. High sonority is created by cold and harsh terrains and is influenced by sexual expressiveness but it is decreased and/or inhibited by movement into a more suitable econiche.

References:

Achterberg, Jerusha T. and Pierce, Anthony J. 2011. Creation of an Aural Map: Convergence of Music and Biological Anthropology Methodologies. Anthropology News. (52, 1): 3-6.

Ember, Carol R. and Ember, Melvin. 2007. Climate, Econiche, and Sexuality: Influences on Sonority in Language. American Anthropologist. (109, 1): 180-185.

Munroe, Robert L. 1996. Cross-Cultural Correlates of the Consonant-Vowel (CV) Syllable. Cross-Cultural Research. 30: 60-83.