Mom v/s dad: Who has a stronger influence on a child's language?
| Aug 23, 2018, 14:13 IST
A recent study has reconciled the two hypotheses - the mother tongue and the father tongue. Population geneticist Li Jin lead a team of researchers that found that in Indo-European populations, the paternal lineages (Y-chromosome) had a stronger influence on a child whereas in terms of the vocabulary (lexicon) of their languages; whereas the mother tongue was associated with pronunciations (phoneme).
The genetic-linguistic relationship of 34 populations speaking different Indo-European (IE) languages was explored for this study. Then a number of differences were calculated in terms like vocabulary, phenome, the basic word list and phonemic inventory and the sound system in a language. The team then found that a change in vocabulary was associated with the paternal side while phonemics were associated with the maternal side.
Dr. Menghan Zhang, the first author of the paper also stated that there was an unbalanced correlation between genetics and linguistics. This can be explained by male-dominant population contact and the strategy of language learning by local females.
The genetic-linguistic relationship of 34 populations speaking different Indo-European (IE) languages was explored for this study. Then a number of differences were calculated in terms like vocabulary, phenome, the basic word list and phonemic inventory and the sound system in a language. The team then found that a change in vocabulary was associated with the paternal side while phonemics were associated with the maternal side.
Dr. Menghan Zhang, the first author of the paper also stated that there was an unbalanced correlation between genetics and linguistics. This can be explained by male-dominant population contact and the strategy of language learning by local females.