A Meaty Idea About the Sound of Language

An undergraduate major I considered but backed away from was linguistics, so this story, based on recent research published in Science, caught my eye. It presents the idea that the range of sounds used in different languages varies relative to when its speakers moved from hunting and gathering to using agriculture.

The researchers analyzed Stone Age and modern skulls and created simulations of how different jaw placements allow our mouths to make different sounds. They analyzed a database of roughly 2,000 languages — more than a quarter of languages in existence today — to identify which sounds were more and less frequently used, and where.

Languages spoken by groups with hunter-gatherer societies in their more recent past are far less likely to use consonants used by longtime farming societies, the study found....

Before societies cultivated crops and learned to cook food, early humans chewed tough raw meat — which was hard work on our jaws and teeth. Stone Age adult skulls don't look like modern skulls. These older skulls have upper and lower teeth closing directly on top of each other — whereas today most people have some degree of overbite, with the front teeth extending in front of bottom teeth when the mouth is closed.

"If you are raised on softer foods, you don't have the same kind of wear and tear on your bite that your ancestors had, so you keep an overbite," said Bickel.

Eating softer foods not only sets the jaw in a different fashion, but also changes which sounds are easily pronounced. In particular, it becomes much easier to say "f'' and "v," which linguists call "labiodental" sounds.

So, there's a fact I never knew, and a reminder of why linguistics is a fascinating subject.