Urban Matthias, Naranjo Matías Guzmán
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire "Dynamique du Langage" (UMR 5596) & Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France.
University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2025 Apr 24;15(1):14365. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-86265-8.
The settlement of the Americas is one of the major episodes of prehistoric human dispersal, and involved multiple temporally and geographically uneven demographic events that continued into the Holocene. Here we suggest the possibility that these complex dynamics are reflected in the spatial structure of Indigenous linguistic diversity. On the basis of newly collated data, we find more pronounced spatial structure in linguistic diversity in North America than in South America after known genealogy and language contact are accounted for. Furthermore, we report a continent-wide gradient in aspects of sound systems and grammatical structure that mirrors early north-south dispersal paths, and that is not explained by local language contact and known phylogenetic relationships.
美洲的殖民化是史前人类迁徙的主要事件之一，涉及多个在时间和地理上不均衡的人口事件，这些事件一直持续到全新世。在此，我们提出一种可能性，即这些复杂的动态过程反映在原住民语言多样性的空间结构中。基于新整理的数据，在考虑已知的谱系和语言接触之后，我们发现北美洲语言多样性的空间结构比南美洲更为明显。此外，我们报告了一个在语音系统和语法结构方面的全大陆梯度，它反映了早期的南北迁徙路径，并且不能用当地语言接触和已知的系统发育关系来解释。
