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.
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