Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity

Abstract

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures.

Linguistic system and sociolinguistic environment as competing factors in linguistic variation: A typological approach

“…However, Barth and Kapatsinski (2018) show that a real predictor may fail to contribute to a model's predictive capacity measured by C-index and it may instead be inflated by the random structure. For this reason, I do not evaluate goodness-of-fit using C-index (see also Sinnemäki and Di Garbo 2018). again skewed to the right, namely, most languages have less than 50% share of L2 speakers.…”

“…Parameters are estimated in glmmADMB by maximum likelihood ratio using Laplace approximation. Following Sinnemäki and Di Garbo (2018), this approximation was further improved by using so-called importance sampling, providing the argument impSamp with values greater than 0 (Skaug and Fournier 2006). 11 Since the number of cases is discrete count data, it would be appropriate to use Poisson regression in the modelling.…”

“…Bentz and Winter (2013) focused on just one aspect of morphological complexity, the number of morphological cases in a language, and found evidence that the greater the proportion of L2 speakers was in a speech community, the smaller its case system was as well. Sinnemäki and Di Garbo (2018) further argued that morphological complexity depends on both population size and the proportion of L2 speakers and crucially when both factors are built in the same model. This result corroborated earlier claims by Trudgill (2011) who argued that multiple sociolinguistic factors may affect typological distributions.…”

“…The rationale for this hypothesis stems from the fundamental observation that linguistic phenomena are affected by multiple causes and therefore an ideal research design includes multiple competing predictors (Gries 2003). In addition to attempting to re-evaluate these two earlier studies, I build population size and the proportion of L2 speakers as predictors in the same model to evaluate their relative strength on the number of cases in the spirit of Sinnemäki and Di Garbo (2018).…”

Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross‐Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems

“…Reali et al () offer a formal modeling treatment of how a variant’s ease to be learned affects its diffusion in the community, and how this correlates with the size and composition of the community. Sinnemäki and Di Garbo () highlight that, in looking at group size and morphological complexity, the number of adult learners (L2 speakers) does not trivially correlate with population size and that the effect on morphological complexity varies across morphological domains.…”