Language Diversity across the Consonant Inventories: A Study in the Framework of Complex Networks

In this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a single parameter for this model that is meant to introduce a small amount of randomness in the otherwise preferential attachment based growth process. The experiments with this model parameter indicates that the choice of consonants among the languages within a family are far more preferential than it is across the families. Furthermore, our observations indicate that this parameter might bear a correlation with the period of existence of the language families under investigation. These findings lead us to argue that preferential attachement seems to be an appropriate high level abstraction for language acquisition and change.