More rule than exception

Posted on 8 March 2021

New published article in the field of grammar/gene relations

Giuseppe Longobardi (Dept. Language and Linguistic Science), Prof. Guido Barbujani (Università di Ferrara, Italy) and their research teams have recently published ‘More Rule than Exception: Parallel Evidence of Ancient Migrations in Grammars and Genomes of Finno-Ugric Speakers’ in the journal Genes. The paper focuses on the study of the grammar/gene relations.

As part of an ERC-granted project at the University of York, Prof. Longobardi and collaborators from the Università di Reggio Emilia (Italy) have worked out a method to reconstruct language families deeper in time than the traditional ones (e.g. Germanic, Romance, Slavic or even Indo-European etc.). This method classifies languages into families not by comparing their words but the ‘invisible’ mental rules of their syntax. The results are surprising: not only does the method recognise the well-known language families, like those above, but is also able to compare languages across those families and suggest more ancient relations between their ancestral speakers.

Population genetics also historically classifies human groups, and already since Darwin a parallelism has been envisaged between the evolution of languages and genes in the history of mankind. York’s group and their collaborators have been studying these parallelisms for many years now, also through the application of specific mathematical models. As Luca Cavalli Sforza, the late Stanford professor and pioneer of genetic anthropology, often used to remark, there are exceptions to the coevolution of genes and languages in the diversification of human populations. A salient one, also highlighted in a previous study by Prof. Longobardi’s team in 2015 ‘Mapping the world’s linguistic diversity: scientists discover links between your genes and the language you speak’ is represented by Finno-Ugric peoples in Europe, such as Hungarians and Finns. The speakers of most other Finno-Ugric languages live in smaller communities in Russia, and on the whole, present the same pattern of their linguistic relatives in central Europe: they all speak clearly similar languages, descending from the same ancestral proto-language, but display genetic features heavily influenced by their current neighbours, speaking Indo-European or Turkic languages.

In Prof. Longobardi’s new study the method for syntactic comparison worked out at York has been combined with the biologists’ recent attempts to recapitulate the genetic history of a population through a complete DNA analysis of single contemporary and ancient individuals. Finno-Ugric speakers turn out to be less exceptional than previously thought, in the correlation of their linguistic and genetic differences: they have undergone measurable effects of syntactic contact with their neighbours only slightly less salient than the effects of repeated intermarriage on their genes. Most importantly, the parallelism between the two external influences, on languages and on genes, is systematic to the closest detail, showing that even Finno-Ugric provides more regularity than exception for a theory of coevolution of biological and linguistic diversity. Based on the comparison of modern and ancient genomes, the analysis identifies the Pontic-Caspian steppes as the possible origin of the migration processes that led to the expansion of Finno-Ugric languages into Europe, and suggests a more complex demographic scenario than often recently assumed only focusing on the origin of Indo-European languages.

“When linguists try to go as deep in time as beyond the boundaries of the known language families, as our syntactic method finally allows us to do, they must naturally turn to population genetics to find standards of evidence and comparison that just looking at vocabularies or at the tacit witness of archaeology cannot satisfactorily provide; for the second time in few years we could prove that the two disciplines can really enlighten each other…” - Prof. Giuseppe Longobardi, Dept. Language and Linguistic Science

To read the article: More Rule than Exception: Parallel Evidence of Ancient Migrations in Grammars and Genomes of Finno-Ugric Speakers