New York

For years, scientists have attempted to decipher if climate and geography affect the way people speak their language. While some argue that ecological effects have negligible impact on the sonority of a language, others contend that right from temperature to elevation, languages are influenced by myriad entities. Now, a new remarkable study published by linguists claims that languages spoken in the warmer climates, in the tropics, are much louder than those spoken in colder climates. 

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Dr Søren Wichmann, together with colleagues from China published the study titled "Temperature shapes language sonority: Revalidation from a large dataset" in online journal, PNAS Newxus and demonstrated that average ambient temperature influences the loudness of languages. 

"Generally speaking, languages in warmer regions are louder than those in colder regions," said Wichmann. 

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Methodology used

Without making the findings of the research complex for the layman, Wichmann said the basic idea of the study is that when speaking or listening, we are surrounded by air. The words spoken are transmitted through the air as sound waves and thus physical properties of air influence how they [spoken words] are produced and perceived. 

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"On the one hand, the dryness of cold air poses a challenge to the production of voiced sounds, which require vibration of the vocal cords. On the other hand, warm air tends to limit unvoiced sounds by absorbing their high-frequency energy," he added. 

To arrive at the conclusion, Wichmann and his colleagues used the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) database which contains the basic vocabulary of 5,293 languages and is constantly being expanded. 

The researchers found that languages around the Equator and Southern Hemisphere had high mean sonority indexes (MSI). Languages in Oceania have some of the highest MSIs.

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However, there were some exceptions to the trend. Mesoamerica and Mainland Southeast Asia showed lower MSIs despite being tropical. Researchers said the exception means that the effect of temperature on sonority develops slowly and over the course of centuries or even millennia. 

"Overall, however, we were able to establish a clear relationship between the mean sonority of  families and the mean annual temperature," said Wichmann.

Notably, the world record for low sonority belongs to the Salish languages on the northwest coast of North America.

Similar studies can help scientists identify how the languages evolved due to the migration of Homo sapiens across the planet. They could carry clues about the environment of their predecessor languages. 

(With inputs from agencies)