Superlinguo

Suzy Styles of NTU’s BLIP Lab has put together this chart showing the most common speech sounds across languages. It’s set out like the IPA chart, but incorporates features such as unvoiced nasals that are represented with diacritics and not typically included in the main chart. You can see that only a few sounds occur in 80% or more of the world’s languages, and there are many sounds that only occur in a small handful (some of you may think of Zipf’s law when you see this distribution, as only a few sounds are in many languages, and many sounds are only in a few languages).

It’s useful if you’re building a conlang and you want to know how naturalistic it sounds. It’s also handy if you’re learning a language and want to know just how ‘weird’ those ‘weird’ sounds you’re learning are. For example, the trilled ‘r’ of Italian and Spanish [r] is actually much more common than the English ‘r’ sound [ɹ], and the sound at the start of thing in English [θ] is also pretty unusual.

From the figshare page for the chart:

Prevalence rates of speech-sounds across 1672 languages. Data from PHOIBLE Online. Colour scale indicates range from the listed percentage to the next higher percent.

This figure first appeared in Styles SJ (2016) ‘Sensory worlds: Multisensory outcomes of sensory tuning to phoneme structure’ Presentation at the 5th Southern African Microlinguistics Workshop, Bloemfontein, South Africa, November 2016.

Data source:
Moran, S., McCloy, D., & Wright, R. (2014). PHOIBLE Online. Retrieved 2016-10-06, from Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology https://phoible.org/

You’ll be seeing more of this chart, and its implications, on Superlinguo soon!