Atkinson on phoneme inventories in Science

[Peter Trudgill]

Both Pericliev (2004) and, to a lesser extent, Hay & Bauer (2007) 
were written in response to my Linguistic Typology paper (Trudgill, 
2004a). As I said in my reply to Pericliev, and others who were 
invited to contribute to the same issue of Linguistic Typology 
(Trudgill, 2004b), my sociolinguistic-typological suggestion was 
never that there was any sociolinguistic reason to suppose that there 
would be a straightforward relationship between population size and 
phoneme inventories. Rather, I proposed a number of social factors 
which, I hypothesised,  could be expected, in combination, to have 
some influence on phoneme inventory size.

These factors are, as I discuss at greater length in Trudgill (2011): 
small vs large community size; dense vs loose social networks; large 
vs small amounts of communally shared information; high vs low social 
stability; and low vs high degree of linguistic contact. Most of 
these factors are less readily susceptible to quantification than 
community-population size; and so it is not surprising that it is 
this latter factor which statistically-minded workers have for the 
most part concentrated on and sampled.

In my forthcoming book (Trudgill, 2011), however, I suggest that, 
while it is acknowledged that it is important in constructing 
linguistic-typological samples to avoid areal and genetic bias, there 
is also an insuperable problem of chronological bias. We cannot make 
a genuine sample of all of the languages that have ever existed; and 
if, as a consideration of the above five sociolinguistic- typological 
factors suggests, modern languages are not, as a whole and on 
average, typical of how languages have been for most of human 
existence, then a representative modern sample will not in fact be 
representative.

Peter

Hay, Jennifer and Laurie Bauer. 2007. Phoneme inventory size and 
population size. Language 83.388-400.
Pericliev, Vladimir. 2004. There is no correlation between the size 
of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological 
inventory of that language. Linguistic Typology 8.376-83.
Trudgill, Peter. 2004a. Linguistic and social typology: the 
Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories. Linguistic Typology 
8. 305-320.
Trudgill, Peter. 2004b. On the complexity of simplification. 
Linguistic Typology 8. 384-388.
Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic typology: the social 
determinants of linguistic structure and complexity. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press


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