"When speakers of different languages meet, their words, sounds and even grammatical structures mingle in surprising ways. Ketchup, for example, may be an American staple today, but its name entered English via the Chinese language Hokkien around the end of the 17th century. Or consider the phrase attorney general: we place the adjective after the noun because that was standard word order in French when the Normans invaded England in 1066."
"The team's results, published on August 29 in Science Advances, supported their hypothesis: when populations that speak unrelated languages have children together, their languages become 4 to 9 percent more likely to share linguistic features. The effect, though subtle, is quite consistent, says the study's co-senior author Chiara Barbieri, a geneticist at the University of Cagliari in Italy. When we have this genetic mixing, we have more [linguistic] borrowing overall."
When speakers of different languages meet, words, sounds and grammatical structures frequently mix through linguistic borrowing. Genetic traces of past interbreeding record historical contact between distinct populations. Analysis of nearly 5,000 contemporary genomes from every inhabited continent identified 126 cases of ancestry indicating admixture. Languages associated with those admixed populations are 4 to 9 percent more likely to share linguistic features, even when the source languages are unrelated. The increase is modest but consistent, showing that genetic mixing correlates with higher rates of lexical, phonological and structural borrowing across human groups.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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