Expert: Dana Krempels, Ph.D. - 6/22/2007

Question
Hi,
I'm just wondering if there's any proven relation between a person's mother tongue and their voice type. I always get the impression for example, that native Spanish speaking people have a more nasal voice, while Japanese sound more guttural and Indians are more high pitched. This is only an impression of course that may be linked to faulty stereotypes so I'd like to know if there's any truth in it.

Answer
Dear Dan,

I know of no studies in which anyone tried to link voice timbre to native language.  If one were to do such a census, I am guessing that there would be tremendous variation in the human voices speaking *every* language, though certain languages can foster more *pronunciation* of gutteral sounds, high-pitched sounds, etc.  This could be why you associate certain voice types with certain languages.  But it could just be the language itself that sounds a certain way, and not the voices that speak it.

That said, humans, like any other species, have undergone genetic drift among their various populations.  An isolated population of humans, like that of any other species--will begin to take on certain characteristics of the small, founding population, and begin to vary somewhat from the human population at large, if there is no gene flow between the new, small population and other humans.

This is probably one major contributor to the superficial racial phenotypes (physical appearances) we see in humans, and there is no reason to think that voices don't have their own subtle phenotypes, as well.  

Now that human populations are so mobile and more likely to interracially interbreed, these subtle differences may be more difficult to detect, and they may some day disappear altogether.  

But there's a good project for you!  :)  Cataloguing voice phenotypes in genetically distinct human populations!  

Hope this helps.

Dana