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1 .This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?
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2 .Winter is high time for humidifiers.
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3 .Because dry air can irritate your throat.
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4 .But a new study finds that arid conditions might have influenced the development of the very languages that some people speak.
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5 ."Extensive research on human physiology suggests that really dry air makes it hard for us to use our vocal cords very precisely."
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6 .Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguistics professor at the University of Miami.
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7 .He and his colleagues recently investigated that dry-throat-phenomenon in regards to complex tonal languages, like Cantonese,
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8 .where various combinations of rising and falling tones can actually change the meaning of a word, as opposed to non-tonal languages, like English or Italian.
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9 .In the non-tonals, the fundamental meaning is the same, whether I say "word" "word" or "word."
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10 .By mapping the distribution of more than 3,700 tonal and non-tonal languages,
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11 .Everett and his colleagues found that tonal languages tend to cluster in warm, humid areas.
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12 .And they're 10 times less prevalent in dry, subfreezing climes, like Siberia, compared with non-tonal languages.
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13 .The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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14 .Of course, it's physically possible to speak a tonal language in a cold place.
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15 ."Obviously speakers of Cantonese for instance can communicate in Siberia and other dry places."
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16 .The big picture, Everett says, is that language evolves in relation to where it's spoken.
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17 ."Language does not evolve.
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18 .It is not impervious to the effects of environment.
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19 .Just as ecologies impact human behavior and the adaptive processes of human cultures in myriad ways, they seem to also influence the ways in which languages develop."
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20 .Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
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