Diet, Dentition, Linguistics Linked

Date: 18 January 2021 - 21:18

News ID: ۸۶۶۷۲

WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- University of Miami anthropologists reveal that a soft food diet -- contrasted with the diet of hunter-gatherers -- is restructuring dentition and changing how people speak.
"Languages change -- we can see this in any language -- but the thinking has long been that all languages have the same pressures, that there is no difference across populations that make some people more prone than others to use certain sounds,” said Caleb  Everett, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Miami.
He highlighted a "highly publicized” paper published in Science Magazine two years ago, while noting that in addition to this new research, he has spent several years studying how environmental factors such as ambient aridity -- extreme dryness -- shift speech patterns by reducing vowel usage, which requires more effort to pronounce.
Yet changes in language take hundreds of years to emerge, Everett explained. So, to obtain a quicker accounting, the two examined the speech patterns of 10 celebrities -- including British singing phenom Freddie Mercury and former Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps -- a research subset that offered a spectrum of dentition variance.