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Inferring linguistic transmission between generations at the scale of individuals

Valentin Thouzeau, Antonin Affholder, Philippe Mennecier, Paul Verdu, Frédéric Austerlitz
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/441246
Valentin Thouzeau
†CNRS, MNHN, Université de Paris, UMR 7206 Eco-Anthropologie, Paris 75016, France
*Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, PSL, Research University, Paris, France
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  • For correspondence: valentin.thouzeau@gmail.com
Antonin Affholder
†CNRS, MNHN, Université de Paris, UMR 7206 Eco-Anthropologie, Paris 75016, France
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Philippe Mennecier
†CNRS, MNHN, Université de Paris, UMR 7206 Eco-Anthropologie, Paris 75016, France
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Paul Verdu
†CNRS, MNHN, Université de Paris, UMR 7206 Eco-Anthropologie, Paris 75016, France
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Frédéric Austerlitz
†CNRS, MNHN, Université de Paris, UMR 7206 Eco-Anthropologie, Paris 75016, France
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Abstract

Historical linguistics strongly benefited from recent methodological advances inspired by phylogenetics. Nevertheless, no available method uses contemporaneous within-population linguistic diversity to reconstruct the history of human populations. Here, we developed an approach inspired from population genetics to perform historical linguistic inferences from linguistic data sampled at the individual scale, within a population. We built four within-population demographic models of linguistic transmission over generations, each differing by the number of teachers involved during the language acquisition and the relative roles of the teachers. We then compared the simulated data obtained with these models with real contemporaneous linguistic data sampled from Tajik speakers from Central Asia, an area known for its large within-population linguistic diversity, using approximate Bayesian computation methods. Under this statistical framework, we were able to select the models that best explained the data, and infer the best-fitting parameters under the selected models. This demonstrates the feasibility of using contemporaneous within-population linguistic diversity to infer historical features of human cultural evolution.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 09, 2021.
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Inferring linguistic transmission between generations at the scale of individuals
Valentin Thouzeau, Antonin Affholder, Philippe Mennecier, Paul Verdu, Frédéric Austerlitz
bioRxiv 441246; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/441246
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Inferring linguistic transmission between generations at the scale of individuals
Valentin Thouzeau, Antonin Affholder, Philippe Mennecier, Paul Verdu, Frédéric Austerlitz
bioRxiv 441246; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/441246

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