The many origins of diversity and complexity in phonology

Atkinson attempts to link “phoneme diversity” with the spread of language from Africa, explicitly attempting to draw parallels with human genetic diversity, frequently shown to be highest in Africa and lowest outside that continent. There are four major flaws in Atkinson’s reasoning, which we discuss separately in the sections following: (i) conflating independent dimensions of phonological elaboration into a single dimension (Section 2); (ii) failing to evaluate the true number of independent dimensions of complexity, missed by Atkinson (Section 3); (iii) using ranged data instead of data indicative of true levels of diversity (Section 4); (iv) conflating a measure of complexity with “diversity”, generating a false parallel with biological genetic diversity (Section 5). We leave to others the discussion of how relevant total populations of dialectally diverse national languages can possibly be to an investigation of Pleistocene populations and their languages.