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Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution

What If Our History Was Written In Our Grammar?

Kentaro K. Shimizu and Balthasar Bickel published together with other authors an article on "Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in northeast Asia"

Utae Ehara playing the mukkuri. (© Utae Ehara)

Culture is an important factor for tracing the population history. Utae Ehara playing the mukkuri. (© Utae Ehara)

 

Read the article of the UZH press release

 

Abstract

Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genomes. Previous studies examined similarities between cultural variation and genetic variation (population history) at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated these parallels across language families using diverse cultural data. We report an analysis comparing culture and genomes from in and around northeast Asia spanning 11 language families. We extract and summarize the variation in language (grammar, phonology, lexicon), music (song structure, performance style), and genomes (genome-wide SNPs) and test for correlations. We find that grammatical structure correlates with population history (genetic history). Recent contact and shared descent fail to explain the signal, suggesting relationships that arose before the formation of current families. Our results suggest that grammar might be a cultural indicator of population history while also demonstrating differences among cultural and genetic relationships that highlight the complex nature of human history.

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