How did the Indo-Europeans spread?

Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Dispatch, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics.

🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery

This week's content from Linguistic Discovery.

Linguistic Idiocentrism

Whenever I mention any sort of dialect diversity in English (words, phrases, or pronunciations that are particular to specific dialects) on social media, I inevitably receive comments along the lines of “nobody says that” or “that’s incorrect”, rather than simply, “I’ve never encountered that. That’s different from how I talk.” Seeing this so often on social media reminds me of the False Consensus Fallacy:

a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to “see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances”. (Wikipedia: False consensus effect)

You might call the linguistic version of this Idiolectal Bias or maybe Linguistic Idiocentrism—the belief that your particular way of speaking is in some way more common, standard, or correct. This is why most people think they don’t speak with an accent. The reality is, however, we don’t have as much exposure to other ways of speaking as we think; and even when we do encounter such variation, we’re really bad at noticing it. I linked to a study a few weeks ago that showed just how bad, in fact:

Unraveling the Complexities of Accent Identification

COLUMBUS, Ohio – When we think about accents, it might seem as though discerning one voice from another is as simple as hearing how differently a word is pronounced. Those of us who have grown up s

ScienmagSCIENMAG

So the next time you encounter a way of speaking you’ve never heard before, consider the strong likelihood that a lot more people say it that way than you realize!

Protolanguage: Meaning + Examples Explained - Rosetta Stone

Learn all about what a protolanguage is, including common examples and how linguists use them to understand more about the languages we speak today.

Rosetta StoneJennifer Gunner

📰 In the News

Language and linguistics in the news.

In response to Trump’s executive order declaring English the official language of the executive branch, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has issued a statement against it:

• Four reasons why English should not be the official language of the United States

The LSA’s main points, backed by various studies which they cite, are:

• The United States has always been a multilingual country, and this gives it strength.
• Citizens of the US and of all democracies inevitably have different linguistic ways of navigating their lives, and enforced monolingualism never achieves national unity.
• “Official English” policies do not improve economic prospects for those who arrive in the US speaking another language, nor do they improve communication for those who live in multilingual communities.
• Supporting and promoting multilingualism makes a nation stronger, not weaker.

In a similar but more caustic vein, linguists Mark Turn and Ross Perlin (the latter of whom authored the bestselling book Language city: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues in New York [Amazon | Bookshop]) wrote an article in The Conversation trenchantly attacking Trump’s order as reflecting the president’s own “linguistic insecurity, […] weakness, and fear”.

Trump’s English language order upends America’s long multilingual history

Across its nearly 250-year history, the United States has never had an official language until now. But Americans will not stop using languages other than English because of an executive order.

The ConversationMark Turin

For my own take on Trump’s order, check out this issue of the newsletter:

The linguistics of Trump’s official English policy

Trump issued an executive order making English the official language of the U.S.—sort of. Here’s what that order does, and what language in the U.S. looks like today.

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

🗞️ Current Linguistics

Recently published research in linguistics.

Predicting what conversation looks like in the brain

Researchers have long tried to map different aspects of speech onto activity in different regions of the brain. As you might expect, it’s nowhere near as straightforward as we’d like: saying the word “apple” doesn’t always light up the same areas of the brain in the same ways. Language is highly context-dependent. And speech is such a complex network of sounds and words and syntactic constructions and meanings that it’s impossible to cleanly map these various components of language onto brain activity. In the past, researchers have avoided this problem by focusing on just one aspect of speech at a time—prosody (like we looked at the other week), syntax, meaning, etc.

Babies can learn multiple languages from birth—and they’ll slow the onset of dementia if they do

Babies can learn multiple languages from birth—and they’ll slow the onset of dementia if they do. Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

This study uses a speech recognition model called Whisper instead, which is designed to transcribe audio recordings of natural conversations. Whisper analyzes the speech stream at multiple levels, just like language itself—low-level acoustic information all the way up to high-level information about which words tend to appear in which contexts. The authors recorded about 100 hours of conversation while monitoring the brain activity of the speech participants using electrocorticography (ECoG)—a corpus of 520,209 words, which is incredibly large for an experiment measuring brain activity. Traditional experiments in this area involve participants reading a passage of text or just a few dozen sentences. So the scale of the data for this study is remarkable, enabling a much more accurate computational model of speech.

What the authors found is that the internal representations created by the Whisper language model mapped onto brain activity better than traditional computational models which don’t create these hierarchical internal representations. And they were able to watch speech production and processing happen in real-time. They could see, for example, that the brain progresses from thinking about what it wants to say, to beginning to form sounds. Then, after listening, the brain thinks back on what was just said.

Smooth talker: Hebrew University study gives insight into brain’s role in linguistic interaction

The research bridged acoustic, speech, and word-level linguistic structures, offering unprecedented insights into how the brain processes everyday speech in real-world settings.

The Jerusalem PostARIELA OHRENSTEIN

A unified acoustic-to-speech-to-language embedding space captures the neural basis of natural language processing in everyday conversations - Nature Human Behaviour

This study links acoustic, speech and linguistic data with brain activity during real-life conversations to create a model that predicts neural responses during speech with high accuracy.

NatureAriel Goldstein

The genetic spread of the Indo-Europeans

I reported last month that new DNA evidence helped further solidify our understanding of the origins of the Indo-European peoples and their language, called Proto-Indo-European. Current evidence tells a story where Pre-Indo-European peoples migrated from Anatolia to the Ukrainian steppe just north of the Black Sea sometime before 3000 BCE. They then mixed with the local people there, becoming a group that archaeologists call the Yamnaya.

The quest for the first Indo-Europeans, and whales communicating like humans

New DNA evidence emerges in the hunt for the first speakers of Indo-European, and researchers discover that whalesong shares a property of human language never before found in the animal kingdom.

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

The Yamnaya would go on to have a profound impact on Eurasian history. They were likely the first people to ride horses and use wheeled carts, making them an unstoppable invading force for other cultures of Eurasia at the time. They spread rapidly across the Eurasian steppe and throughout Europe, bringing their languages with them and often killing the males of any society who resisted. As a result of this tidal wave of cultural replacement and the subsequent histories of their descendants, today about 42% of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language.

While last month’s reporting on this research focused on its linguistic implications, this round of reporting is now drawing attention to the genetic implications: the descendants of the original Indo-Europeans can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya of 5,000 years ago—and indeed to a single hamlet in the Russian-occupied region of Ukraine called Mykhailivka, an archaeological site spanning 3635–3383 BCE. The authors came to this conclusion by analyzing the DNA samples from 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 samples that had been previously analyzed. The DNA of an individual from Mykhailivka is the crucial genetic link between the earlier peoples that migrated into the region and the later Yamnaya.

• Reporting: The ancient horsemen who created the modern world (WSJ)
  • Non-paywalled version available at MSN here.

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age - Nature

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of 81 prehistoric individuals reveals how the genetic makeup of people from the North Pontic region was influenced by waves of migration during the Eneolithic period and Early Bronze Age.

NatureAlexey G. Nikitin

That’s it for this week! Thank you so much for being a subscriber, and I hope you enjoyed this issue! If you’d like to support Linguistic Discovery and help educate the world about the science and diversity of language, consider becoming a supporter! You’ll get bonus articles/videos and early access to chapters of my book!

Have a great week!

~ Danny

🚫 Errata

Corrections and clarifications.

In my post on guacamole, I said that the word mōlli meant ‘sauce’, and while this is true, it obscures the fact that mōlli, like āhuacatl ‘avocado’, has a noun suffix at the end of it. The -tl suffix becomes -li after stems ending in /l/, so the base of mōlli is just mōl-.

I also had a small typo in the word āhuaca-.

Taking all this into consideration, I updated the etymological flowchart for ‘guacamole’, and the text of the accompanying article:

guacamole

Where do the words “avocado” and “guacamole” come from?

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.