We know that weather and climate can affect many aspects of human and animal behavior. Here is one I did not know about. An article this week in Atlas Obscura discusses languages in different parts of the world and notes that linguists have determined that languages developed in warm parts of the world have developed more sonorous sounds than in colder areas. According to the article, sonority is a measure that can partially be understood as loudness, though it also includes how resonant a word is. For example, a word with lots of vowels like “mouth” has a bigger and rounder sound that uses more space in the mouth and is therefore more sonorous than a word like “lips,” which has higher frequencies and is much more closed. The article discusses several reasons why this might be. Note that it does not relate to cultural volume of voices but to the sounds of the words themselves.
