Does phoneme inventory size correlate with population size?

Atkinson 2011 finds a significant positive correlation between population size and phoneme inventory size (confirming Hay & Bauer 2007) and explains it by migration: phoneme sizes are largest in Africa, and as societies spread out of Africa and around the world they went through population and cultural bottlenecks and underwent phonological simplification as a consequence. We believe the correlation is artefactual if it exists at all, and it probably does not exist. To test it we surveyed 1,350 languages with excellent genealogical and geographical coverage and distribution. We used the Autotyp areal breakdown (Bickel & Nichols 2002). Population size figures were taken, where possible, from grammars, ethnographies, and/or recent census data, and attempt to give population figures for the entire ethnic group (and not just speakers of the language, since most of the world’s languages are losing speakers to large national and international languages); where we did not have this information we used figures from Lewis (ed.) 2009. Language shift has increased rapidly in recent decades, so that the size of the ethnic group is a better measure of the size of the speech community in which the oldest and most fluent speakers grew up, and it is these speakers’ competence that grammars usually describe. The log of population size was coded for each language. Since ethnic groups and speech communities of under a few hundred individuals are ordinarily unstable (not impossibly, but the languages of such communities are frequently undergoing shift and death), all population sizes reported in units or tens were coded as 499 (treating these speech communities as though they still had the sizes reported for them in the early to mid-twentieth century). For each sample language we surveyed the total number of consonant phonemes (excluding phones found only in unassimilated foreign loans), the total number of phonemic vowel qualities, and the number of tone oppositions. AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR