Global patterns in consonant inventories: Frequency distributions and phoneme associations
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Consonants are fundamental components of spoken language. This study investigates the consonant inventories of 913 languages from the PHOIBLE database, with particular attention to three primary dimensions: manner, place, and voicing. Furthermore, it analyzes statistical associations among consonants within and across these categories to identify the underlying patterns in the structure of human language. The results show that single consonants, especially those without diacritics, are the most common. The consonants /m, k, n, j/ occur in more than 90% of the languages in the dataset. By manner of articulation, plosives are the most frequently occurring category, followed by fricatives and nasals. By place of articulation, alveolar consonants are dominant, whereas bilabial and velar consonants occur at nearly comparable rates. The role of voicing differs across the manner categories, with voiceless sounds often being less marked than their voiced counterparts. Finally, multidimensional scaling reveals clusters of related consonants, highlighting structural associations in the consonant inventories. Future research should analyze consonant groupings more in-depth, and develop more consistent transcription practices to enhance the accuracy and reliability of cross-linguistic statistical analyses.
Abstract
Consonants are fundamental components of spoken language. This study investigates the consonant inventories of 913 languages from the PHOIBLE database, with particular attention to three primary dimensions: manner, place, and voicing. Furthermore, it analyzes statistical associations among consonants within and across these categories to identify the underlying patterns in the structure of human language. The results show that single consonants, especially those without diacritics, are the most common. The consonants /m, k, n, j/ occur in more than 90% of the languages in the dataset. By manner of articulation, plosives are the most frequently occurring category, followed by fricatives and nasals. By place of articulation, alveolar consonants are dominant, whereas bilabial and velar consonants occur at nearly comparable rates. The role of voicing differs across the manner categories, with voiceless sounds often being less marked than their voiced counterparts. Finally, multidimensional scaling reveals clusters of related consonants, highlighting structural associations in the consonant inventories. Future research should analyze consonant groupings more in-depth, and develop more consistent transcription practices to enhance the accuracy and reliability of cross-linguistic statistical analyses.