Language contact plays a great role in the complexity of languages as well as its diversity. Such contacts that is long-term during childhood and proficient will lead to simplification. The long-term presence of many neighboring languages which are borrowed to complete the segments. As a result, phoneme inventories are rapidly increasing.For example, Rennellese has 13 consonants, Emae 15, Mele-Fila 16, and West Uvean 26. Moreover, simplification may very well lead to loss of phonological contrasts: the smaller the inventory, the easier it is to learn, which is why the most extreme products of pidginization, pidgin languages themselves, tend to have small phoneme inventories.So, long-term contact involving child bilingualism may produce large inventories through borrowing, and adult language contact may produce smaller inventories through imperfect learning, pidginization, and simplification. Unfortunately, however, this latter cannot be the only explanation for small inventories. Low degrees of language contact may lead to languages with small inventories, because the memory load difficulties caused by confusability and word length will not be relevant, since post-critical threshold learning is not involved.
Child v.s Adult speakers
. In cases where there is long-term language contact involving child-language acquisition, high degrees of language contact may lead to larger phoneme inventories, as a result of borrowing, as suggested by Nichols.
. Situations involving adult language contact, on the other hand, are likely to favor medium-sized phoneme inventories, i.e., inventories which are not so large as to be difficult for adolescents and adults to remember and acquire, but not so small as to cause confusability of constituents and high word length.
Small communities to keep large inventories?
Because the ability of small communities encourages continued adherence to norms from
one generation to another, however complex they may be. we should distinguish between
isolated communities which do, however, have neighbors, such as the San and the Yele,
and isolated communities which do not, such as the Hawai’ians. small communities
which have neighbors, but which wish to remain as isolated as possible, may elaborate
systems in order to make them more opaque to these neighbors. Migrations carried
settlers to ever more remote parts of the Pacific, was accompanied by ever smaller
phoneme inventories .
large communities & small inventories?
Because it is difficult for adolescents and adults to remember and acquire. .
The memory load difficulties caused by confusability and word length will not be
relevant, since post-critical threshold learning is not involved. They may also just as
well lead, however, to large inventories, because, equally, the memory load difficulties
caused by the acquisition of large numbers of phonemes will not be relevant either.
Other factors
Besides language contacts, the size of phoneme inventory also depends on the population size.
There is a robust connection between them. The more people speak in one kind of languages,
the bigger its phoneme inventory is likely. For example, China with the population of about
1.4 billion puts Mandarin as its authorized language. But there are many dialects in China
due to its vast area.So there is a positive correlation between the size of phoneme inventory.
The small population one country has, the small phoneme inventory it creates or vice versa.