Excerpt and photo from reporter.anu.edu.au
Islands drive language change and generate language diversity in similar ways to how they drive species diversity, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU) that analysed languages from over 13,000 inhabited islands.
Although accounting for a tiny proportion of the world’s land mass, islands have had a disproportionately large impact on biological science because they show evolution in action.
One example of this is the Galápagos Islands, famous for shaping 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin’s thoughts on evolution.
ANU biologists were interested in whether islands played a similar role in understanding language change and diversity. They developed a database of all languages from over 13,000 inhabited islands to answer this question.