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Significance There has been considerable debate about the extent to which our biological and linguistic histories match to each other, supported by examples of both matches and mismatches. We introduce… Click to show full abstract
Significance There has been considerable debate about the extent to which our biological and linguistic histories match to each other, supported by examples of both matches and mismatches. We introduce a genomic database (GeLaTo, or Genes and Languages Together) to quantify matches and mismatches worldwide. While in most populations genetic and linguistic relations match, mismatches occur regularly as a result of language shift, and several language families follow diversification patterns different from that of the genomes. These findings reveal features of population contact in human history that were previously inaccessible to observation. Our database opens avenues for disentangling demographic and linguistic history and for comparing biological and linguistic modes of evolution.
Journal Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Year Published: 2022
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