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Robert K. Colwell

Museum Curator Adjoint in Entomology


Curriculum vitae


robertkcolwell [at] gmail.com


Museum of Natural History

University of Colorado

Boulder, CO 80309, USA




robertkcolwell [at] gmail.com


Museum of Natural History

University of Colorado

Boulder, CO 80309, USA



Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity


Journal article


Marco Túlio Pacheco Coelho, E. Pereira, H. Haynie, T. Rangel, P. Kavanagh, K. Kirby, S. Greenhill, Claire Bowern, R. Gray, R. K. Colwell, N. Evans, M. Gavin
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2019

Semantic Scholar DOI PubMed
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Cite

APA   Click to copy
Coelho, M. T. P., Pereira, E., Haynie, H., Rangel, T., Kavanagh, P., Kirby, K., … Gavin, M. (2019). Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.


Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Coelho, Marco Túlio Pacheco, E. Pereira, H. Haynie, T. Rangel, P. Kavanagh, K. Kirby, S. Greenhill, et al. “Drivers of Geographical Patterns of North American Language Diversity.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2019).


MLA   Click to copy
Coelho, Marco Túlio Pacheco, et al. “Drivers of Geographical Patterns of North American Language Diversity.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2019.


BibTeX   Click to copy

@article{marco2019a,
  title = {Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity},
  year = {2019},
  journal = {Proceedings of the Royal Society B},
  author = {Coelho, Marco Túlio Pacheco and Pereira, E. and Haynie, H. and Rangel, T. and Kavanagh, P. and Kirby, K. and Greenhill, S. and Bowern, Claire and Gray, R. and Colwell, R. K. and Evans, N. and Gavin, M.}
}

Abstract

Although many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why humans speak so many languages and why languages are unevenly distributed across the globe, the factors that shape geographical patterns of cultural and linguistic diversity remain poorly understood. Prior research has tended to focus on identifying universal predictors of language diversity, without accounting for how local factors and multiple predictors interact. Here, we use a unique combination of path analysis, mechanistic simulation modelling, and geographically weighted regression to investigate the broadly described, but poorly understood, spatial pattern of language diversity in North America. We show that the ecological drivers of language diversity are not universal or entirely direct. The strongest associations imply a role for previously developed hypothesized drivers such as population density, resource diversity, and carrying capacity with group size limits. The predictive power of this web of factors varies over space from regions where our model predicts approximately 86% of the variation in diversity, to areas where less than 40% is explained.


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