Isolated human groups speak more diversified languages: paper in PNAS by Graff et al.
Languages are diverse: thousands are spoken worldwide, and they differ widely in the structures they use. Human DNA variation preserves the history of populations and individuals. Are these two dimensions of human diversity related? Does the diversity of languages correlate with the diversity of their speakers?
This question has captured the imagination of scientists and the public for over a century. A new international study led by the University of Zurich and published in PNAS suggests the answer is yes – but not in the way one might expect. Regions with low genetic diversity across speakers show languages with high diversity, and vice-versa. In other words, the more diverse our DNA, the more similarly we speak!
https://evolvinglanguage.ch/isolated-human-groups-speak-more-diversified-languages/
Anna Graff, Erik J. Ringen, Taras Zakharko, Mark Stoneking, Kentaro K. Shimizu, Balthasar Bickel, Chiara Barbieri. 2026. An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity. PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2526762123