BibTeX

@article{wichmann-etal-2011-phonological-147887,
	title        = {Phonological diversity, word length, and population sizes across languages: The ASJP evidence},
	abstract     = {Previous literature has reported a positive correlation between phoneme inventory sizes and population sizes for languages, indicating that larger languages tend to make more phonological distinctions, and claims have also been made that average word length and phoneme inventory sizes are negatively correlated. Yet another relevant variable is geography, since the spatial propinquity of languages influences the similarity of their overall typological profile; moreover, specific historical events affecting language distributions, such as migrations or the development of certain cultural advantages, are usually also anchored geographically. In this paper we replicate previous findings on a substantially larger set of data drawn from comparative wordlists in the database of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), and discuss the relationships among the three variables mentioned in the title of the paper as well the influence of geography, including the idea that phonemic diversity across the world's languages provides evidence for an out-of-Africa model of the expansion of languages.
},
	journal      = {Linguistic Typology},
	author       = {Wichmann, Søren and Rama, Taraka and Holman, Eric},
	year         = {2011},
	volume       = {15},
	number       = {2},
	pages        = {177--197},
}