Scientists have identified universal grammatical rules common to hundreds of the world’s languages, an advance that points to shared thinking that shapes human communication.
Linguists have long argued about recurring patterns across human languages, pointing to “universal” grammatical rules.
Researchers have sought to prove the existence of such long-debated “universals” governing languages across the globe.
Now, a new analysis of over 1,700 languages has found that languages tend to evolve in predictable ways rather than randomly.
The latest study overcomes the limitations of previous research by analysing a large sample of languages from across the world
Scientists assessed Grambank, a comprehensive database of grammatical features across the world’s languages and found statistical support for about a third of the proposed linguistic universals.
Some of these universals include specific word order patterns.
For instance, if a language puts the verb at the end, it usually uses postpositions after the verb.
“In the face of huge linguistic diversity, it is intriguing to find that languages don’t evolve at random,” said Annemarie Verkerk, an author of the study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
“I am delighted that the different types of analyses we did converged on very similar results, suggesting that language change must be a central component in explaining universals,” Dr Verkerk said.
Researchers found that there are several commonalities between languages, including word order preferences, such as whether verbs come before or after objects, and hierarchical structures, such as how grammatical relationships are marked within sentences.
Many of the common patterns were found repeatedly across hundreds of unrelated languages in different parts of the world.
“Shared cognitive and communicative pressures push languages towards a limited set of preferred grammatical solutions,” said Russell Gray, another author of the study.
These findings suggest there are common constraints guiding how new languages emerge, researchers say.
They point to underlying cognitive and communicative forces that shape human language, they explain.
However, the precise nature of these constraints could not be identified in the current study.
“Given that universals differ in strength, our results elucidate future directions in universals research,” scientists wrote in the study.
“Our analyses do not distinguish between different potential causal mechanisms but do provide a restricted set of universals to investigate further,” they wrote.