Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866910125415989248 |
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| author | Mavridis, Marius De Gregorio, Juan Toral, Raul Sanchez, David |
| author_facet | Mavridis, Marius De Gregorio, Juan Toral, Raul Sanchez, David |
| contents | 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. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11565 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages Mavridis, Marius De Gregorio, Juan Toral, Raul Sanchez, David Computation and Language Statistical Mechanics Information Theory Physics and Society 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. |
| title | Phonological distances for linguistic typology and the origin of Indo-European languages |
| topic | Computation and Language Statistical Mechanics Information Theory Physics and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11565 |