Globally, human house types are diverse, varying in shape, size, roof type, building materials, arrangement, decoration and many other features. Here we offer the first rigorous, global evaluation of the factors that influence the construction of traditional (vernacular) houses. We apply macroecological approaches to analyse data describing house features from 1900 to 1950 across 1000 societies. Geographic, social and linguistic descriptors for each society were used to test the extent to which key architectural features may be explained by the biophysical environment, social traits, house features of neighbouring societies or cultural history. We find strong evidence that some aspects of the climate shape house architecture, including floor height, wall material and roof shape. Other features, particularly ground plan, appear to also be influenced by social attributes of societies, such as whether a society is nomadic, polygynous or politically complex. Additional variation in all house features was predicted both by the practices of neighouring societies and by a society's language family. Collectively, the findings from our analyses suggest those conditions under which traditional houses offer solutions to architects seeking to reimagine houses in light of warmer, wetter or more variable climates.

Politicians' voice pitch is known to affect voters' evaluation of the candidates in the US. But to what extent is this true outside of the American context? To address this question, we conducted an original survey experiment in Japan. Our findings are threefold. First, in contrast to previous studies, voters in Japan do not systematically prefer lower-pitched over higher-pitched female politicians. Second, our findings suggest heterogeneity in the effect of voice pitch by voters' gender – while Japanese women are indifferent as to female candidates' pitch levels, men are more likely to prefer female candidates who speak at lower pitch. Third, preliminary analyses reveal limited evidence that female candidates' political experience conditions the effect of voice pitch over voters' willingness to vote for that candidate. Our findings suggest that lowering pitch is likely to increase female candidates' electoral prospects by attracting male voters without backlash from female voters.

Kinship is a fundamental and universal aspect of the structure of human society. The kinship category of ‘grandparents’ is socially salient, owing to grandparents’ investment in the care of the grandchildren as well as to older generations’ control of wealth and cultural knowledge, but the evolutionary dynamics of grandparent terms has yet to be studied in a phylogenetically explicit context. Here, we present the first phylogenetic comparative study of grandparent terms by investigating 134 languages in Pama–Nyungan, an Australian family of hunter–gatherer languages. We infer that proto-Pama–Nyungan had, with high certainty, four separate terms for grandparents. This state then shifted into either a two-term system that distinguishes the genders of the grandparents or a three-term system that merges the ‘parallel’ grandparents, which could then transition into a different three-term system that merges the ‘cross’ grandparents. We find no support for the co-evolution of these systems with either community marriage organisation or post-marital residence. We find some evidence for the correlation of grandparent and grandchild terms, but no support for the correlation of grandparent and cross-cousin terms, suggesting that grandparents and grandchildren potentially form a single lexical category but that the entire kinship system does not necessarily change synchronously.

Bardi is the northernmost language of the Nyulnyulan family, a non-Pama-Nyungan family of the Western Kimberley region of northwestern Australia. Currently about five people speak the language fluently, but approximately 1,000 people identify as Bardi. The region was settled by Europeans in the 1880s and two missions were founded in Bardi country in the 1890s. Use of the language began declining in the 1930s. Many Bardi people were moved several times between 1940 and 1970, both to other missions dominated by speakers of other Indigenous languages and to local towns such as Derby. This community disruption accelerated the decline of language use in the community and first language acquisition. Bardi is the name of the language variety spoken at One Arm Point. There are two other named mutually intelligible varieties apart from Bardi: Baard and Jawi. The extent of dialect diversity within Bardi is unknown, but does not seem to have been particularly high compared to that between named varieties. The ISO-639 language code is [bcj].

Joan A. Argenter and R. McKenna Brown (eds.) Endangered Languages and Linguistic Rights: on the Margins of Nations. Proceedings of the Eighth FEL Conference, Barcelona (Catalonia), Spain, 1–3 October, 2004. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 2004. 228 pp. Pb £17/US$32.

Endangered Languages and Linguistic Rights: On the Margins of Nations is a collection of papers originally presented at the Foundation for Endangered Language's (FEL) annual conference; the 2004 meeting was held in Barcelona. The great majority of the papers are written in English, with a few in Spanish and one in Catalan.