It's been suggested in various studies in the past, such as this study conducted by researchers at Evanston Northwestern University and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, that there are differences between the sexes when it comes to picking up new languages, but what about passing languages on? Does one sex play a larger role in teaching children how to speak?

Most would infer from the term "mother tongue", usually defined as the language we start speaking first, that language acquisition in children is mostly down to mothers, but that idea could soon be out the window.

A group of researchers led by Menghan Zhang at the Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology at the University of Fudan discovered in a study that actually both parents have an influence on language acquisition in children — just on different areas of language.

It was previously thought language was acquired exclusively from mothers — but that isn't the case

In 1997, researchers also put forward a theory that opposed the notion of a "Mother Tongue", which proposed that children acquired language from their fathers as opposed to their mothers: in contrast with the "Mother Tongue Hypothesis", the "Father Tongue Hypothesis" states that humans tend to pick up their fathers' language as opposed to their mothers'. The study on which the "Father Tongue Hypothesis" was based was conducted by Estella Poloni and other researchers at Geneva University, who looked at the correlations between language variations and genetic lines from both the mother and the father.

Estella Poloni, who led the research, established that linguistic variations correlated with the Y chromosome, passed on from the father, and had no correspondence with mitochondrial DNA, passed on only by the mother.

Maternal mitochondria passed down to children may explain why children try to imitate the sounds their mothers make, rather than their mothers' vocabulary. 

However, the term "mother tongue" is not a complete misnomer; mothers have a great deal of influence over how infants acquire language.

Children generally tend to spend more time with their mothers than with their fathers until they reach adolescence, they actually begin to learn their "mother tongue" before they're even born.

By this point, they're already capable of distinguishing between their own "mother tongue" and a foreign language, and can recognise 800 words. It's not by coincidence that bilingual babies are quick to recognise the sounds of two different languages.

Essentially, the mother not only imparts speech; she also communicates traditions, behaviours, responsibilities, and everything from which one might argue a culture is comprised. In essence, a mother is passing down not only a language but a culture too.

According to Zhang's team, the Y chromosome — passed on by fathers — may be responsible for children tending to pick up their fathers' vocabulary.  

To solve the conundrum of whether language is imparted by the mother or the father, Zhang's team conducted a genetic-linguistic study of 34 modern Indo-European populations , focusing on the respective links present between vocabulary and the paternal Y chromosome, as well as sounds and maternal mitochondrial genes. Unlike previous studies, the researchers characterised the languages based on lexical (vocabulary) and phonemic (sound) systems separately.

According to Zhang's study, while we assimilate pronunciation and sound from our mothers, we actually acquire our vocabulary from our fathers — a finding which completely contradicts ideas we'd previously held about language acquisition.

The researchers were able to conclude that there were strong links between paternal genes and lexical characteristics and similarly, that there was a firm correlation between maternal genes and phonemic characteristics.

It seems the researchers may have dispelled both the "Father Tongue Hypothesis" and the "Mother Tongue Hypothesis" by uniting the both of them.

Originally posted on Business Insider / Business Insider Italia.

This story originally appeared on Business Insider Italia and has been translated from Italian.