Labiodental fricatives /f v/ are less present in languages having a small number of consonants

(A) The conditional probability of having phoneme /f/ or /v/ given the consonant inventory size, P(/x/|Size) was calculated from counts in UPSID₄₅₁. We have divided the set of 451 languages into 2 classes (Small/S and Average+Large/AL) from the 5 classes described in WALS, with a limit set at 19 consonants (S < 19; AL >= 19). S-class languages (n=164; average number=14.6) have a lower probability of having /f/ or /v/ compared to AL languages with a medium or large consonant inventory (n=287; average number=27) (P(/f/|S)=0.21; P(/f/|AL)=0.51; Percentage comparison test: p<0.001; P(/v/|S)=0.07; P(/v/|AL)=0.29; p<0.001). (B) The geographical distribution of language classes S and AL established in WALS (which is compatible with UPSID₄₅₁) confirms that S-Class languages overlap with Hunter-Gatherers (HG) populations. S-class distribution is similar to this of “no labiodental” in figures D and E of the abstract of (Blasi et al., 2019) whatever the subsistence class. HG populations are located mainly in Oceania and America.