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Out of Africa? The logic of phoneme inventories and founder effects

Atkinson (2011) discusses a tantalizing result, that phoneme inventory size may reflect a set of population expansions out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. The starting point for the article is a correlation, first noted in Hay & Bauer 2007, that inventory size is positively correlated with population size. Atkinson shows that inventory size, as measured by a combination of features based on WALS data (Haspelmath et al. (eds.) 2008), declines as distance from Africa increases, even controlling for population size. He attributes this correlation to serial founder effects. As appealing as such results may seem at first glance, there are both methodological and conceptual problems with the study. In this commentary, I focus on the role of founder effects and their relation to phoneme inventory size, causes of inventory expansion and contraction, and what we know about founder events in recorded history. In sum, I argue that founder effects do not apply at the level of the phoneme, that we have no data on whether population correlations hold within small groups, and that the current distribution of languages, for most of the world, reflects Holocene rather than Pleistocene expansions.