People May Speak More Loudly or Quietly Depending on the Climate
In new research, scientists analyzed around 346,000 words from about 5,000 languages and dialects and calculated each language’s average “sonority.” Sonority is a measure that can partially be understood as loudness, though it also includes how resonant a word is. For example, a word with lots of vowels like “mouth” has a bigger and rounder sound that uses more space in the mouth and is therefore more sonorous than a word like “lips,” which has higher frequencies and is much more closed.
They then looked at global temperature records from NASA to assess whether there was a relationship between these two variables. They found that language families that developed in warmer climates tend to have greater sonority, or tend to be louder, than those that developed in colder areas. To be clear, it’s not that the people speaking these languages tend to speak louder, it’s that the quality of the words in these languages are more resonant, or easier to say loudly. The findings were published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
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