Geographical Location and Language

PLEASE!!! READ THE FILE I UPLOADED FIRST AND THE DO THE ASSIGNMENT WITH THE INSTRUCTION BELOW!!! Everett (2013) attempts to link the presence of ejectives in a language to the altitude at which the speakers reside. Do you believe that there is a link between the geography of speakers' environments and the phones (sounds) found in their language? Consider the evidence Everett uses - does it show a link of causality or is it merely correlative (i.e. does higher altitude cause a language to have ejectives or is it just a coincidence that languages with ejectives occur at higher altitudes). Explain why you believe it is either causative or correlative. Use evidence from the article. Also think about what you learned in class about how ejectives are made in the articulatory system. In the end decide if Everett presents a sound argument. Tell why you think he does or doesn't. 2 FULL (or more) pages Double-spaced 1” margins 12 point font Times New Roman THANK YOU!

Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives

We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high. The patterns uncovered surface on all major world landmasses, and are not the result of the influence of particular language families. They reflect a significant and positive worldwide correlation between elevation and the likelihood that a language employs ejective phonemes. In addition to documenting this correlation in detail, we offer two plausible motivations for its existence. We suggest that ejective sounds might be facilitated at higher elevations due to the associated decrease in ambient air pressure, which reduces the physiological effort required for the compression of air in the pharyngeal cavity-a unique articulatory component of ejective sounds. In addition, we hypothesize that ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air. These explications demonstrate how a reduction of ambient air density could promote the usage of ejective phonemes in a given language. Our results reveal the direct influence of a geographic factor on the basic sound inventories of human languages.

It is generally assumed that the worldwide variation of sounds in human languages is largely arbitrary [1,2]. That is, cross-linguistic disparities in phonological patterns are assumed to be primarily due to stochastic variation in the phonetic gestures relied upon in particular languages. Diachronic influences resulting from linguistic affiliations, both areal and familial, do yield some tendencies in the regional distributions of phonological patterns. In addition, some linguistic sounds are more common due to their relative ease of articulation or perceptual salience. Nevertheless, cross-linguistic phonetic and phonological variation is presumed to be fundamentally arbitrary in the sense that it is not due to nonlinguistic influences such as the geographic context in which a language is produced. One recent strand of research, however, has challenged this basic assumption by offering compelling evidence that warmer climates correlate positively with the degree of sonority of a given language, at least in a small though diverse sample of about sixty languages [2,3,4]. According to such work, more sonorous phonological features (such as simple syllables with higher rates of vowel occurrence and greater mean amplitude) are more likely to occur in languages spoken in warmer climates, putatively because cultures in hotter places rely more heavily on communication at greater distances. Assuming this pattern of sonority holds for larger samples of the world's languages, its geographic impetus is indirect since the true motivation is supposedly relative proximity of interlocutors during typical communicative events.