Are human languages influenced by the climate?

Question

Sometimes when building a world, and in particular since Tolkien, one may wish to create original languages for the inhabitants. There are some information around the site about the creation of conlang, but @knave made a good summary on our blog. From there, we learn that one of the first step is to decide on the phonemes of the new language.

However in the world creation steps, it is likely that we define the climate and geography of the world before populating it.

I was thus wondering whether the climate or geography had some influence in the phoneme used in a given region. Are colder countries more prone to use guttural sounds? Etc.

Answer 1

I can't remember what to search for to find the article again, but I found a neat article on the tonal languages, such as Chinese, which depend on the pitch of the vowels to convey meaning. They found that all such languages were found in equatorial regions. They postulated that the tonal languages may depend on reasonable climates and high humidity, because those are conditions which make it easier to maintain the level of vocal chord health required to continuously create such changing pitches.

Answer 2

There are some theories.

Ejectives are predominantly found in languages at high altitudes (e.g. Caucasus). Does lower air pressure help the pronunciation of ejective consonants? Maybe. See Everett C (2013) Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65275.

(This one is a speculation) If you have a climate that facilitates survival of abandoned children or groups of children (say, pre-teens in a jungle whose parents are lost or dead) with not quite mature language, they, after they grow up, will pass a mangled and heavily modified version of the language to their children, and languages will diverge quickly. In a hostile climate (e.g. the Arctic), survival without you community is impossible and the language will be passed relatively unchanged. Now, compare the linguistic diversity of Subsaharan Africa or Brazil (thousands of widely diverse languages) with that of the Arctic - historically, there is Inuit and related Yupik... and that's about all.

Answer 3

Language is not inherited biologically. It is a cultural phenomenon, it is inherited through culture.

The climate of an area has very little to do with the language spoken in that area. What counts is the history of the region, who conquered it last, what was their cultural level, how many people they brought in and so on.

Languages, at least successful languages, do not remain fixed in the place they were born, like plants. They spread, they move, they evolve. English was born on a cold, foggy and rainy island; but it is now spoken in sunny California, and in parched Australia, and in frigid Alaska. French was born in the sweet heart of France, blessed by the mildest climate of all Europe; but it is now spoken from Montreal in Quebec, to Cayenne in French Guiana, to Brazzaville in Congo. Russian is spoken over an unimaginably large territory, from the Pontic Steppe in the south-west to the Siberian taiga in the north-east, comprising fertile plains, and unforgiving steppes, and rugged mountains and whatever have you.

So here we are: three examples of languages spoken over every imaginable climate and geography. And what do those examples show? They show that the climate of a district is irrelevant when it comes to finding out what language is spoken there. What counts is its history.

Consider the perfect example: Asia Minor, known as Anatolia nowadays.

What languages are spoken in Asia Minor?

Well, it all depends on when.

There were the Anatolian languages, Hittite, and Luwian and Lycian and so on; and there was Phrygian; and there was Armenian. And we know that those languages were not autochthonous, for they are Indo-European languages, and we even have direct references in ancient Hittite texts to a previous language which had been replaced by Hittite. And then came the Greeks, and Asia Minor spoke Greek, a language quite unlike the languages it replaced. And then came the Turks, and nowadays Asia Minor speaks Turkish, a language utterly unlike Greek. So that, the supposed influence of the climate of Asia Minor becomes irrelevant when compared to the overwhelming importance of history.

Answer 4

Although scientifically I have little to offer, there is something I'd like to add here. Generally speaking our names for things start with what is around us, and we name things off of that afterwards. For example, guinea pigs are not pigs, koala bears are not bears, red pandas are not pandas. Or perhaps my favourite, the flying fox. We could have called it a giant bat, but then you can imagine the first time its name was used. "It was huge! Like a fox with wings!"

I believe this also extends itself to naming simpler things. We have names for snow, frost, sleet. But there could be cultures that could never have seen snow, that may have a word for frost, but not snow, and hence call it "falling frost" instead.

Our surroundings definitely change our language. A rainbow comes from the words rain and bows yet has existed long before mankind invented the word bow, so why that name?

In Norwegian there is the term "stormskritt" which is literally "storm steps" but means something more like "progress by leaps and bounds". Why use the word "storm" at all? Well, I imagine it's because historically the people loved and feared storms, because they had a lot of them and lived by the sea. So it worked into the language. If storms weren't common in their climate, then those people probably wouldn't have used that phrase.

Edit: I realise the question is specifically about the sounds of the languages, and therefore my answer doesn't offer much, except I would like to highlight: We re-use a lot of parts of words because they use something we already know that is easy to say. So I imagine if a climate makes a particular sound harder to make, that's the main impact I would expect. For example, in climates where keeping your mouth open could lose precious body heat, avoiding sticking your tongue out would make sense.

Edit edit: Another thing to consider is sometimes we copy sounds of other things. Such as the cuckoo, or dik-dik. Since we then copy the noise that animal makes, we can re-use that. Such as cuckoo going from a bird sound to meaning 'bonkers'. A cuckoo lives in its own climate to survive, and therefore areas without that living creature would never develop that terminology because of that animal. Therefore, climate defined a piece of that language.

Answer 5

At least pitch of language depends on climate. I talked with lady who works in post office in village of Verhneimbatsk, we both talk the same language, but she talks like machine gun, at least 2 times faster than me. Probably, because it was winter, and there is ~ -40 degrees C (-40 F) at winter.

Answer 6

Language has nothing to do with the climate. Language depends on social and historical circumstances.

The simplest example is that half of the world speaks English, although these people live in different climates. For example - in the hot climate of California, in the cold climate of Canada and in the mild climate of Great Britain, people speak English.