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Genes: Interactions with Language on Three Levels—Inter-Individual Variation, Historical Correlations and Genetic Biasing

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The Language Phenomenon

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

The complex inter-relationships between genetics and linguistics encompass all four scales highlighted by the contributions to this book and, together with cultural transmission, the genetics of language holds the promise to offer a unitary understanding of this fascinating phenomenon. There are inter-individual differences in genetic makeup which contribute to the obvious fact that we are not identical in the way we understand and use language and, by studying them, we will be able to both better treat and enhance ourselves. There are correlations between the genetic configuration of human groups and their languages, reflecting the historical processes shaping them, and there also seem to exist genes which can influence some characteristics of language, biasing it towards or against certain states by altering the way language is transmitted across generations. Besides the joys of pure knowledge, the understanding of these three aspects of genetics relevant to language will potentially trigger advances in medicine, linguistics, psychology or the understanding of our own past and, last but not least, a profound change in the way we regard one of the emblems of being human: our capacity for language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Probably the best review of the heritability of aspects of speech and language remains Stromswold (2001).

  2. 2.

    Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, an online comprehensive database of genetic disorders freely browsable at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim.

  3. 3.

    This is not the only deleterious mutation affecting FOXP2: for example, two different mutations in two unrelated individuals produce similar pathologies (Lai et al. 2001; MacDermot et al. 2005).

  4. 4.

    Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, one of the simplest types of genetic variation where a single DNA “letter” (nucleotide) varies between individuals and is present at relatively high frequencies.

  5. 5.

    Roughly, two words in two different languages are cognate if they descend from the same original proto-word.

  6. 6.

    For a map of tone, see the World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) Online, the chapter “Tone” by Ian Maddieson, at http://wals.info/chapter/13.

  7. 7.

    The names “derived” and “adaptive” come from the original work by Bruce Lahn’s group (Mekel-Bobrov et al. 2005; Evans et al. 2005) which, in fact, identified them. They are called “derived” as opposed to the original (ancient) form of the genes and “adaptive” because of the selection pressures acting on them, that the authors claim to have detected. For our purposes here, these are just labels.

  8. 8.

    But see the recent claim that another SNP of Microcephalin is associated with cranial volume in normal Chinese males (Wang et al. 2008).

  9. 9.

    However, the methodology used to infer this is probably not adequate and the claimed recent selection has not been replicated.

  10. 10.

    There are no high ASPM-D and low MCPH-D in the sample (Dediu and Ladd 2007; Ladd et al. 2008).

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  1. Language and Genetics Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Dan Dediu

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Dediu, D. (2013). Genes: Interactions with Language on Three Levels—Inter-Individual Variation, Historical Correlations and Genetic Biasing. In: Binder, PM., Smith, K. (eds) The Language Phenomenon. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36086-2_7

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