Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Shcherbakova O
PROVIDER: S-EPMC10431698 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Shcherbakova Olena O Michaelis Susanne Maria SM Haynie Hannah J HJ Passmore Sam S Gast Volker V Gray Russell D RD Greenhill Simon J SJ Blasi Damián E DE Skirgård Hedvig H
Science advances 20230816 33
Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of ...[more]