Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions.

Velar nasals occur in fewer inventories than bilabial or coronal ones – in about 53%, compared to about 95% in our language sample – so they might well be expected to be more likely to be found where consonant inventories tend to be larger, as there is an overall trend for cross-linguistically rarer consonants to occur in larger inventories ( Lindblom and Maddieson, 1988 ).

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