(Image: Pixabay CC0)
(Image: Pixabay CC0) - Does the history of our languages match the history of our genes? A team of scientists at the University of Zurich and the Max-Planck-Institute have revealed a large number of matches - but also widespread mismatches in around 20 percent of cases, including in Malta, Hungary and Namibia. More than 7,000 languages are spoken in the world. This linguistic diversity is passed on from one generation to the next, similarly to biological traits. But have language and genes evolved in parallel over the past few thousand years, as Charles Darwin originally thought? An interdisciplinary team at the University of Zurich together with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has now examined this question at a global level. The researchers put together a global database linking linguistic and genetic data entitled GeLaTo (Genes and Languages Together), which contains genetic information from some 4,000 individuals speaking 295 languages and representing 397 genetic populations. One in five gene-language links point to language shifts. In their study, the researchers examined the extent to which the linguistic and genetic histories of populations coincided.
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