When the media report on the results of studies published in Nature journals, the sentence ‘An international research team has discovered...’ is usually included. In this case, an international research team led by Frederic Blum has discovered that extended word beginnings are an almost universal feature of language.
Doctoral student Frederic Blum
What was it like for him to read media reports that mentioned his name in a leading position? ‘Strange in multiple ways,’ says Blum, laughing. After all, when he started the study, he was still a master's student at Humboldt University in Berlin and a student assistant in a research project at the Leibniz Institute for General Linguistics. During a student project researching the history of the Quechua languages, he also got to know his current doctoral supervisor, Professor Johann-Mattis List, who has held the Chair of Multilingual Computer Linguistics at the University of Passau since 2023 and is pleased about the talent in his team: ‘It's great for our department to have such a successful doctoral student.’
13 milliseconds mark the beginning of a word
Blum's master's thesis was a precursor to the study that appeared in the journal Nature Human Behaviour in September 2024. In their study, the researchers use computational methods to investigate phenomena of systematic acoustic lengthening in speech data. They were able to observe a pattern of acoustic effects for the first time that could serve as a unique marker for different languages – the systematic lengthening of consonants at the beginning of words.
This lengthening is barely perceptible, as it amounts to just 13 milliseconds. But for linguists, it is exciting because the statistical analysis confirm for the first time the hypothesis that lengthened word beginnings could be a universal feature of language. Until now, this hypothesis was based on a small evaluation of linguistic data. ‘Moreover, these data come from so-called WEIRD societies. The abbreviation stands for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic. So the data only reflect a very homogeneous part of human diversity,’ explains Blum.
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Example of a lengthened consonant at the beginning of a word in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in the Amazon region of Bolivia. The /n/ at the beginning of a word (100 ms) is significantly longer than the /n/ in the middle of a word (50 ms) and the /n/ at the beginning of an utterance (50 ms).
© Frederic Blum et al., Nature Human Behaviour (2024)
His team, which consisted of researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, the CNRS Laboratoire Structure et Dynamique des Langues, Humboldt University in Berlin and the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics, tested the hypothesis with a much broader and more diverse database. They used data from the DoReCo corpus, which represents an unparalleled linguistic and cultural diversity of human language: it contains language samples from 51 populations from all inhabited continents.
‘Originally, we had expected to refute the hypothesis. That's why we ourselves were surprised by the results of our analysis,’ says Blum. The researchers found that the phenomenon of consonant lengthening at the beginning of words does indeed occur in most languages of the world. There was clear evidence of lengthened beginnings of words in 43 of the 51 languages studied.
Decoding the relationship between indigenous languages
Frederic Blum together with his doctoral supervisor Professor Johann-Mattis List, holder of the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics.
In his doctoral research, Frederic Blum is also investigating language structure and linguistic diversity using new, computer-based methods. His research focuses on languages in a South American context. This is because a great deal of knowledge has been lost here as a result of colonisation and the annihilation of the indigenous population. ‘We hardly know which languages were spoken where a thousand years ago,’ says Blum. ‘This is where historical linguistics can also be a key to the past.’
In his doctoral thesis, he is studying the history of the Pano languages, an indigenous language family spoken primarily in the Peruvian Amazon region. For some time now, there has been a hypothesis that this language shares a common past with the Tacana languages, which are spoken in the Bolivian lowlands. However, conclusive evidence for this is lacking. In his doctoral thesis, Blum develops computer-assisted methods to process language data automatically and thus to verify this hypothesis more thoroughly than would be possible with traditional methods.
‘I enjoy deciphering language structure and linguistic diversity,’ says Blum. He is also passionate about statistics. During his master's degree, he began taking additional statistics courses that were offered in the field of geography. The knowledge he gained from his studies initially helped him with his research work for his master's degree and now for his doctorate.
He feels very fortunate to be able to carry out his work at the University of Passau under Professor List while continuing his research as a research associate at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig: ‘Professor Johann-Mattis List is one of the pioneers in the development of computer-assisted methods in linguistics. He is responsible for much of the software and tools used by researchers in the field. ‘Since I wanted to go in exactly this direction, it was the perfect place for me to do my doctorate,’ says Blum.
Professor Johann-Mattis List
How to compare the over 6 000 languages spoken around the world, and how do computer-based methods help?
How to compare the over 6 000 languages spoken around the world, and how do computer-based methods help?
Comparative Linguist Johann-Mattis List has held the Chair for Multilingual Computational Linguistics at the University of Passau since January 2023 and heads the ERC-funded research group "ProduSemy". Before that, he served as stand-in professor at Bielefeld University and as senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena where he headed another ERC-funded research group on computer-assisted language comparison. Professor List earned his doctorate at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and wrote his habilitation at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
