Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity
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2019
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Resumo
Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans
speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed
across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural
and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has
tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversity,
without accounting for how local factors and multiple predictors interact.
Here, we use a unique combination of path analysis, mechanistic simulation
modelling, and geographically weighted regression to investigate the
broadly described, but poorly understood, spatial pattern of language diversity
in North America. We show that the ecological drivers of language
diversity are not universal or entirely direct. The strongest associations
imply a role for previously developed hypothesized drivers such as population
density, resource diversity, and carrying capacity with group size
limits. The predictive power of this web of factors varies over space from
regions where our model predicts approximately 86% of the variation in
diversity, to areas where less than 40% is explained.
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Language diversity, Weighted regression, Path analysis, Geographically
Citação
COELHO, Marco TĂșlio Pacheco et al. Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, Oxford, v. 286, p. 20190242, 2019. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.0242. DisponĂvel em: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0242. Acesso em: 27 mar. 2023.