Did you know that the volume of your voice is affected by the weather? People who live in warm climates tend to speak louder than people who live in cold climates.. This has been confirmed by A study from the University of Kiel, published in PNAS nexus.

“In general, the languages ​​of warmer regions are noisier than those of colder regions,” the doctor explained Soren Wichmann, leader of the team of researchers and linguists. According to the expert, it’s all about how the average temperature of the environment affects the speech volume.

The theory is based on the fact that when we speak we are surrounded by air, and the sound waves from our voice travel through that air. In such a way, the properties of the air determine how our conversation partner hears it.

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When the air is warm, we tend to raise our voices.

“On the one hand, the dryness of cold air poses a challenge to the production of sonorous sounds, which require the vibration of the vocal cords. On the other hand, hot air tends to reduce muffled sounds by absorbing their high-frequency energysays Wichmann.

Loudness in warm climates

The research team discovered this The areas around the equator, in the planet’s southern hemisphere, have a high average loudness. This refers to the volume of certain speech sounds.

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However, regions further into the planet’s northern hemisphere have little noise pollution.

“We were able to establish a clear link between the average loudness of the language families and the average annual temperature,” said the linguist in charge of the project. But he noted that there are exceptions to the rule, as in certain areas of Central America and from mainland Southeast Asiawhich generally have a lower loudness.

According to Wichmann, this research is part of a series of questions about the views of linguistics.

“Research has long assumed that language structures are autonomous and in no way influenced by the social or natural environment. “More recent studies, including ours, are beginning to question this,” he said. (JO)