zompist bboard

I have just downloaded phoible data sets, and I'm doing some data crunching with it.

First, bear in mind that phoible's data has skewed distribution. For example, 17% (that is one in six) of the languages registered in Phoible has labiovelar plosives.

So anyway I'll start with click languages. There are 18 of them in the dataset. On average a click language have:
15.27 clicks
12.33 vowels
43.38 non click consonants

Here is the top most common phonemes by each grouping. There is both dental plosive and alveolar plosive there. I don't think any clicklang distinguish them two. What happened was that there are more than two data source in the phoible, and one source lists the coronal as dental and the other lists it as alveolar. The same can be said with the mid vowel and close mid vowel in the list.

Onward to ejectives, there are 167 ejective languages registered in phoible. On average, an ejective language has,
29,62 Non Ejective consonant
6,26 Ejectives
9,47 Vowels

There is a /t̪ʼ|tʼ/ entry here. What happened is that some of the data comes from UPSID, and in UPSID some consonants are classified as just.... "coronal".



What next? Implosives?

Well, implosives are pretty boring. Basically on average an implosive language has 2.17 implosives. And the two most common implosives are labial and coronal implosive, the palatal implosive is in distant third.