Thursday, August 5, 2010

Population sizes and phonological inventory sizes

Just came across a paper by Vladimir Percliev, of the Department of Mathematical Linguistics (sweet!) at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Title: "There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language." PDF here. In it he offers evidence against claims by Trudgill that large speaker communities favor languages with medium-sized phonological segment inventories, while small communities favor either small or large segment inventories. Percliev takes population figures from Ethnologue and cross-indexes them with the languages in UPSID (the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database); he doesn't see evidence of he claimed correlation.

So anyway, I'm not the first to scrape population figures from Ethnologue :)

Hat tip to Morgan.

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