Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages

2026-04-13

AI Summary

This study proposes a phonological distance metric grounded in second-order Markov chains and information theory, incorporating articulatory feature weighting to quantify genetic relatedness and contact-induced influence across 67 modern Indo-European languages using parallel spoken corpora. By explicitly modeling short-range phonotactic dependencies, the method effectively uncovers large-scale phylogenetic structure and geographic contact signals in phonological systems. The experimental results not only accurately reproduce established genealogical groupings within the Indo-European family but also reveal a statistically significant correlation between phonological and geographic distances. These findings provide novel computational linguistic evidence supporting the Steppe hypothesis regarding the origin of the Indo-European language family.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Analogy
• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we argue that phoneme sequences modeled as second-order Markov chains essentially capture the statistical correlations of a phonological system. This finding enables us to quantify distances among 67 modern languages from a multilingual parallel corpus employing a distance metric that incorporates articulatory features of phonemes. The resulting phonological distance matrix recovers major language families and reveals signatures of contact-induced convergence. Remarkably, we obtain a clear correlation with geographic distance, allowing us to constrain a plausible homeland region for the Indo-European family, consistent with the Steppe hypothesis.

Problem

• phonological distance
• linguistic typology
• Indo-European origin
• language relatedness
• contact-induced convergence

Innovation

• phonological distance
• second-order Markov chains
• information-theoretic framework
• articulatory features
• Indo-European homeland