Paternal Words, Maternal Sounds: Asymmetrical Gene–Language Co-evolution in Indo-European Languages
Updated: Apr 10
How languages are transmitted across generations has long been a central question in research on human migration and linguistic origins. One long-standing debate concerns whether language inheritance is more strongly associated with maternal or paternal ancestry. The mother tongue hypothesis proposes that languages are primarily transmitted along maternal lines, whereas the father tongue hypothesis argues that languages tend to follow paternal lineages because linguistic patterns often show stronger correlations with the Y chromosome than with mitochondrial DNA. For many years these two perspectives appeared to contradict each other. Research on Indo-European populations, however, suggests that the relationship between language and ancestry is more complex than either hypothesis alone implies.
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