PHONEMES AND HISTORY.

PHONEMES AND HISTORY. The result of Dr. Atkinson’s study is dramatic: Language was invented only once. What I found as interesting as the result of the study (showing the spread of languages from one point in Africa) was the proposition that the study rested on: dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa and those with the least phonemes are spoken in areas remote from Africa. (I think you can think of a phoneme as a particular sound. Wikipedia defines a phoneme as “the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.”) In other words, the languages found farthest from Africa tend to make use of the fewest sounds. In general, people farthest from from Africa have the least genetic diversity and their languages have the fewest sounds. One caveat: the scatter diagram in the Economist article does not show a very tight fit. In fact, the distance from Africa does a much better job of explaining genetic diversity than it does explaining number of phonemes.