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Revisiting population size vs. phoneme inventory size

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Steven Moran ,
Daniel McCloy  and
Richard Wright
Steven Moran*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Daniel McCloy*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Richard Wright*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
*
[stiv@uw.edu]
[drmccloy@uw.edu]
[rawright@uw.edu]
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Abstract

In this discussion note we argue against the findings presented in Hay & Bauer 2007, which show a positive correlation between population size and phoneme inventory size. We argue that the positive correlation is an artifact of the authors’ statistical technique and biased data set. Using a hierarchical mixed model to account for genealogical relatedness of languages, and a much larger and more diverse sample of the world’s languages, we find little support for population size as an explanatory predictor of phoneme inventory size once the genealogical relatedness of languages is accounted for.

Keywords

typologyphoneme inventoriespopulation sizesamplingmixed models

Information

Type
Discussion Note
Information
Language , Volume 88 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 877 - 893
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The development of PHOIBLE was partially funded by the University of Washington’s Royalty Research Fund. We would also like to thank contributors to the project: Morgana Davids, Scott Drellishak, David Ellison, Richard John Harvey, Kelley Kilanski, Michael McAuliffe, Kevin Pittman, Brandon Plasters, Cameron Rule, Daniel Smith, and Daniel Veja, as well as Marilyn Vihman for providing the Stanford Phonology Archive data. Tristan Purvis and Christopher Green were integral in curating many of the phoneme inventories from African languages. We would also like to thank Paul Sampson, Theresa Smith, and Donghun Kim for statistical consultation, and the editor of Language and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are of course our own.

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