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Father Tongue hypothesis


The Father Tongue hypothesis proposes that humans tend to speak their fathers' language. It is based on the discovery, in 1997, of a closer correlation between language and Y chromosomal variation than between language and . The initial work was performed on African and European samples by a team of population geneticists led by Laurent Excoffier. On the basis of these and similar findings by other geneticists, the hypothesis was elaborated by historical linguist Georg van Driem in 2010 that the teaching by a mother of her spouse’s tongue to her children is a mechanism by which language has preferentially been spread over time.

Focusing on prehistoric language shift in already settled areas, examples worldwide show that as little as 10-20% of prehistoric male immigration can (but need not) cause a language switch, indicating an elite imposition such as may have happened with the appearance of the first farmers or metalworkers in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages.

Before the discovery of mtDNA variation and Y chromosomal variation in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, it was not possible to distinguish male from female effects in population genetics. Instead, researchers had to rely on autosomal variation, starting with the first population genetic study using blood groups by Ludwik Hirszfeld in 1919. Later other genetic polymorphisms were used, for example polymorphisms of proteins of the blood plasma, polymorphisms of human lymphocyte antigens or polymorphisms of immunoglobulins. On this basis, correlations between languages and genetic variation occasionally were proposed, but sex-specific questions could not be addressed until the 1990s, when both mtDNA and Y chromosomal variation in humans became available for study.

The Y chromosome follows patrilineal inheritance, meaning it is only passed on among males, from father to son. Mitochondrial DNA on the other hand follows matrilineal inheritance, meaning it is only passed on from the mother to her children and from her daughters to their children. In 1997 Laurent Excoffier, his student Estella Poloni and his team reported that they had found a strong correlation between the Y-Chromosome sequence P49a,f/Taql variation and linguistics, while not being able to find such a correspondence for the mtDNA variation. Poloni et al. proposed the possible consequences of such a correlation, i.e. the father tongue hypothesis:


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