{"id":3859,"date":"2010-01-20T14:10:42","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T12:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=3859"},"modified":"2010-01-20T14:23:49","modified_gmt":"2010-01-20T12:23:49","slug":"human-language-dna-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2010\/01\/human-language-dna-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Human language, DNA language?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new paper in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.plosone.org\/home.action\">PLoS ONE<\/a> argues that human languages may adapt like biological organisms. By doing a large-scale analysis of over 2,000 of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s languages the authors find striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsuch as its population and global spread\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages with the most speakers (like English) were found to have far simpler grammars  than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. This reminds me to bottlenecks in population history (and founder effects for certain DNA variants) while the authors describe this phenomenon as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Linguistic Niche\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. A Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium of declension types? <\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"bottom-note\">\n  <span class=\"mod1\">CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 26.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new paper in PLoS ONE argues that human languages may adapt like biological organisms. By doing a large-scale analysis of over 2,000 of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s languages the authors find striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsuch as its population and global spread\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages with the most &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2010\/01\/human-language-dna-language\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Human language, DNA language?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[2599],"class_list":["post-3859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics-biology","category-computer-software","tag-evo-devo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3859"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3861,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859\/revisions\/3861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}