Agriculture Phonetically Changed Human Languages

Agriculture changes the teeth of the first farmers and that changes what they could pronounce, which changed how their languages sounded. 

The shift to processed foods following the spread of agriculture led to less wear on human teeth, altering jaw growth and making slight overbites common in adults. This anatomical change facilitated the pronunciation of labiodental sounds like “f” and “v,” which contributed to language diversification in Europe and Asia around 4,000 years ago. Linguist Balthasar Bickel, in a 2019 Science paper, linked these phonetic developments to changes like the Proto-Indo-European patēr evolving into Old English faeder about 1,500 years ago. This research suggests that cultural shifts can influence human biology in ways that affect language, an idea supported by evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel, who was not involved in the study.

From the Archaeologist page on Facebook discussing 

Damián E Blasi, Steven Moran, Scott R Moisik, Paul Widmer, Dan Dediu, Balthasar Bickel, "Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration" 363 (6432) Science eaav3218 (March 15, 2019). 

The abstract and related prefatory material in the source article are as follows:

The first fricatives 

In 1985, the linguist Charles Hockett proposed that the use of teeth and jaws as tools in hunter-gatherer populations makes consonants produced with lower lip and upper teeth (“f” and “v” sounds) hard to produce. He thus conjectured that these sounds were a recent innovation in human language. Blasi et al. combined paleoanthropology, speech sciences, historical linguistics, and methods from evolutionary biology to provide evidence for a Neolithic global change in the sound systems of the world's languages. Spoken languages have thus been shaped by changes in the human bite configuration owing to changes in dietary and behavioral practices since the Neolithic.

Structured Abstract 

INTRODUCTION 

Human speech manifests itself in spectacular diversity, ranging from ubiquitous sounds such as “m” and “a” to the rare click consonants in some languages of southern Africa. This range is generally thought to have been fixed by biological constraints since at least the emergence of Homo sapiens. At the same time, the abundance of each sound in the languages of the world is commonly taken to depend on how easy the sound is to produce, perceive, and learn. This dependency is also regarded as fixed at the species level. 

RATIONALE 

Given this dependency, we expect that any change in the human apparatus for production, perception, or learning affects the probability—or even the range—of the sounds that languages have. Paleoanthropological evidence suggests that the production apparatus has undergone a fundamental change of just this kind since the Neolithic. Although humans generally start out with vertical and horizontal overlap in their bite configuration (overbite and overjet, respectively), masticatory exertion in the Paleolithic gave rise to an edge-to-edge bite after adolescence. Preservation of overbite and overjet began to persist long into adulthood only with the softer diets that started to become prevalent in the wake of agriculture and intensified food processing. We hypothesize that this post-Neolithic decline of edge-to-edge bite enabled the innovation and spread of a new class of speech sounds that is now present in nearly half of the world’s languages: labiodentals, produced by positioning the lower lip against the upper teeth, such as in “f” or “v.” 

RESULTS 

Biomechanical models of the speech apparatus show that labiodentals incur about 30% less muscular effort in the overbite and overjet configuration than in the edge-to-edge bite configuration. This difference is not present in similar articulations that place the upper lip, instead of the teeth, against the lower lip (as in bilabial “m,” “w,” or “p”). Our models also show that the overbite and overjet configuration reduces the incidental tooth/lip distance in bilabial articulations to 24 to 70% of their original values, inviting accidental production of labiodentals. The joint effect of a decrease in muscular effort and an increase in accidental production predicts a higher probability of labiodentals in the language of populations where overbite and overjet persist into adulthood. When the persistence of overbite and overjet in a population is approximated by the prevalence of agriculturally produced food, we find that societies described as hunter-gatherers indeed have, on average, only about one-fourth the number of labiodentals exhibited by food-producing societies, after controlling for spatial and phylogenetic correlation. When the persistence is approximated by the increase in food-processing technology over the history of one well-researched language family, Indo-European, we likewise observe a steady increase of the reconstructed probability of labiodental sounds, from a median estimate of about 3% in the proto-language (6000 to 8000 years ago) to a presence of 76% in extant languages. 

CONCLUSION 

Our findings reveal that the transition from prehistoric foragers to contemporary societies has had an impact on the human speech apparatus, and therefore on our species’ main mode of communication and social differentiation: spoken language.