Focus Language School has been in operation in Phoenix, Arizona for almost thirty years: the land of desert and eternal sun. Winters are idyllic and summers make you curious about the fires of hell. We have just opened our Chicago area office – in February – and the contrast is striking. In the white beauty of the Illinois winter, you are reminded of wind and ice as forces of nature instead of the relentlessness of the Arizona Summer sun. How does climate and weather help shape languages? The following ideas are intuitive impressions and not the result of a scientific study.
In the European languages it seems that the Southern, warm-climate languages are more vowel-based and gentler to the ear. It is easy to sing them. Consonants are soft: French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, etc. are usually perceived as soft and musical languages. There is a certain ease and grace to the people who speak them. The Northern European languages – Germanic and Slavic – seem stronger or harder. Consonants are more apparent to the ear. There are frequent guttural sounds. The Vikings and the Slavic tribesman perhaps had less time for singing and easy living as they faced harsh winters and survival.
The character of the Southern and Northern people tend to reflect the same differences: the practical, no-nonsense of the Northern Europeans versus the more romantic traits of their southern neighbors.
Soft languages seem to appear in many warm climates: Polynesia, Malaysia, Indonesia, many of the South American native languages.
Asian languages tend to sound strong and more staccato to the Western ear, yet there is more of a lilt and singing quality to Cantonese then there is to Mandarin – a northern dialect.
Southern Indian languages are usually much softer than the Northern Indo-European dialects such as Hindi, Pashtu or Punjabi.
There are also some obvious counter-examples: Arabic, although spoken in warm climates is a strong language and it contains many hard sounds. Is it the harshness of the desert hardening its people and their dialects?
This informal review of sound systems in relationship to climate can make us wonder about the incredible evolutionary sound machine which humans have become. Words pass through millions of mouths and through many generations, evolving uniquely in every location and they shape our own evolution.
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