M-T pronouns

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Across the globe, two phonetic patterns of personal pronouns stand out statistically beyond accepted language families. These are the M–T pattern of northern Eurasia and the N–M pattern of western North America. Other phonetic patterns in pronouns are either statistically insignificant or are more localized.^[1]

In many languages of northern Eurasia, and extending into India, the first person singular ('1sg') pronoun or a pronominal affix has an m or m-like consonant (abbreviated 'M'), and the second person singular ('2sg') pronoun or affix has a t or t-like consonant (abbreviated 'T'). The first is usually a nasal /m/, though some languages have a non-nasal /b/; the second is a non-nasal coronal consonant such as /t, d, t͜ʃ, s/, all of which may derive historically from *t.^[1][2][3] This was recently the case in English, for example, with me, my, mine in 1sg and thou, thee, thine in 2sg. The M–T pattern has been used as an argument for several proposed long-distance language families, such as the Nostratic hypothesis, that include Indo-European as a subordinate branch; Nostratic has even been called 'Mitian' after these pronouns.^[3] However, several of the ancestral protolanguages are reconstructed to have had a *B–S pattern, with the 'B' becoming /m/ in some of the daughter languages, apparently through regional diffusion from neighboring M–T languages.^[3][2]

In many of the languages of western North America, but also sporadically elsewhere in America, the pronouns and pronominal affixes have a different pattern, of N in the 1sg and M in the 2sg. This has been used as evidence that all the languages of the Americas are related (in the now debunked Amerind hypothesis), but corresponds more closely to the Penutian and Hokan proposals, which while controversial are broadly accepted as plausible hypotheses.

Because there is a limited stock of consonants for languages to draw from, and pronouns generally use only a subset of that stock, any common pattern can be expected anywhere in the world just by chance. These two patterns stand out because their frequency is much higher than would be expected by chance.