Linguistic Diversity

How Languages Differ

Let’s start with the usual disclaimer. The line between language, dialect, and ideolect is super blurry. The labels we use are generally political, social, and cultural. But whatever we call them, the similarities and differences are cool to study.

Here are some ways in which languages can differ:

• Phonology (their sound systems)
• Morphology (word formation)
• Syntax (sentence structure)
• Semantics (meaning)
• Pragmatics (use in context)
• Social factors such as population size and community structure

Also of note:

• Languages with few phonemes tend to have longer words; languages with many phonemes tend to have shorter words. (Why?)
• In some languages, almost all words are single morphemes; in others, words are often composed of many morphemes; others are in between. We call these isolating, polysynthetic, and moderately synthetic languages, respectively.
• Some languages have free word order; others are more rigid. Free word order is possible with affixes that show the role of the word in the sentence.
• In some cultures, words can vary their meaning based on who is speaking them and to whom they are being spoken.

A Sampling of Fun Facts

In no particular order, here are just a few fun facts about different languages that highlight this diversity:

• Languages have different number of color words.
• Languages have different number of odor words.
• Some languages have drastically limited words for specific counting numbers; some use recursion to the number of numbers is unbounded.
• In Takuu, the counting numbers are different for people, canoes, fish, and coconuts.
• Scots has many words for rain, including smirr: fine rain drizzle, haar: cold sea fog, spindrift: spray whipped up by the wind; aftak: an easing or lull in a storm or rain; drookit: absolutely drenched; daggle: to fall in torrents; yillen: a shower of rain, especially with wind; uplowsin: heaving rain, goselet: a soaking, drenching, downpour.
• Yagua as inflections for five different levels of remoteness
• Past tenses aren’t always past-or-not, but can be a few hours ago, yesterday, a week ago, a month ago or even longer.
• Not every language has nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. There are many classes that appear in some languages but not others, such as conjunctions, adpositions (prepositions and postpositions), tense markers, ideophones, positionals, determiners, interjections, evidentials, classifiers, and honorifics.
• Languages spoken in colder climates have more consonants and higher frequency of /s/, /z/, and /tʃ/; languages spoken in warmer climates tend to have more vowels and higher frequency of /r/, /l/, and /n/.
• Languages form hunter-gatherer societies have fewer labiodental sounds (like /f/ and /v/) than in those societies with more agricultural practices. (Why?)
• Pro-drop languages

Naturally, there are thousands more facts that could appear here. Feel free to add some of your favorites.

Here’s something interesting, about tendencies of languages with large populations versus small populations:

Possible reasons: smaller communities tend to have less contact with outsiders, less borrowing, more economic self-sufficiency, and are often located in parts of the world with less seasonal variability. In large communities, there are more tourists, more immigrants, more traders—these second-language learners increase the pressure on languages to simplify (shorter words, more regular grammar).

Language Diversity argues against Universal Grammar

The study of so many languages provides a good deal of evidence against Universal Grammar. (Perhaps when the idea was proposed, they weren’t looking at that many languages!)

Apparent Lack of Recursion

Daniel Everett argues the Pirahã language of Amazonian Brazil lacks recursion (embedding clauses within clauses, which Chomsky thought was universal). Everett argued this wasn’t a cognitive limitation but a cultural one, since the Pirahã did not need to discuss anything outside direct experience, so embeddings never arose.

Recursion is probably not universal.

Absence of numbers and counting

Pirahã and Munduruku, among others, lack exact number words beyond (roughly) one, two, and many. These languages reflect cultural practices and needs.

Numerical cognition is not necessarily universal.

Ergative-Absolutive languages

UG was hypothesized when most linguists were focused on Nominative-Accusative languages (like Latin, English, Greek), where the subject of a transitive verb (“she kicked him”) and intransitive verb (“she ran”) are treated grammatically the same. But a huge chunk of the world’s languages, including Basque, Georgian, Tibetan, many Australian Aboriginal languages, and many Mayan languages, are Ergative-Absolutive: they group the object of a transitive verb with the subject of an intransitive one instead.

Nominative-Accusative is not a universal.

Exercise: Read the Wikipedia article on Ergative-Absolutive languages. Or perhaps better, read this article.

Topic-prominent languages

Languages like Mandarin Chinese and Japanese are topic-prominent (sentences has topic-comment structure) rather than subject-prominent (subject-predicate structure).

Subject-predicate structure is not universal.

Time without tense

The Hopi language of Arizona reportedly doesn’t encode time in the tense-based way that Indo-European languages do; it organizes events more around certainty and manifestation than past/present/future.

Tense is not universal.

Tonal languages

UG was built with a strong bias toward segmental phonology (consonants and vowels in sequence). Tone languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, or languages of the Bantu family, pitch is a primary meaning-distinguishing feature at the word level.

Exercise: Research the grammatical features of tones in Yoruba.

Sign languages

Sign languages have a spatial grammar: three-dimensional signing spaces simultaneously encode who is doing what to whom. UG would imply that spoken languages would do this too, but they don’t.

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is pretty cool, with many more examples. It shows that when linguists systematically catalogued features across thousands of languages, feature after feature that had been proposed as universal turned out to be highly variable (word order, case marking, use of morphology, how questions are formed, whether there’s a passive construction, tenses, and so on). The apparent universals mostly dissolved into tendencies or statistical preferences when enough cross-linguistic data was finally gathered.

Constraints on Diversity

Why aren’t there even more languages?

For speech, we have anatomical (vocal tract, auditory system) and cognitive (brain size and shape) constraints that limit the range of possible sounds and structures. Our bodies limit the number of gestures and facial expressions we can add. Our brains won’t let us remember too many embedded clauses at once.

In writing, the constraints aren’t quite as big of a deal.

How Languages Change

Words change over time due to various factors such as sound shifts (vowel, consonant, clicks) from mishearing or mispronunciation; semantic shifts from changing environments and social structures or even simple misunderstandings; borrowing from other languages; word shortening and other efficiency-driven changes; reanalysis; social influences; and sometimes we just create new words for identity marking.

Languages evolve through these processes too, and also through migration, contact with other populations, and splitting of communities.

We can often reconstruct the evolution and splitting of languages into families by comparing systematic sound changes, shared vocabulary, and grammatical structures. You can find a bunch of language family tree charts and images online. Here is one from Reddit:

Since it is from Reddit, you should check it against reputable sources. Here are some that are worth studying:

• Glottolog
• Ethnologue
• WALS

Recall Practice

Here are some questions useful for your spaced repetition learning. Many of the answers are not found on this page. Some will have popped up in lecture. Others will require you to do your own research.

1. What are some of the dimensions along which languages can vary?
   Phonology (sound systems), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (language use in context), and sociolinguistic factors (variation by social group, region, etc.).
2. What is an isolating language?
   One in which words typically consist of a single morpheme, and grammatical relationships are expressed through word order and auxiliary words rather than inflection.
3. What is the opposite of an isolating language?
   A polysynthetic language.
4. What makes free word order possible?
   Affixes.
5. What is the difference between a smirr and a daggle?
   A smirr a very light rain and a daggle is a really, really heavy rain.
6. What is a pro-drop language?
   A language in which pronouns can be omitted, usually because they are inferable from the verb conjugation.
7. What are some characteristics of languages with large populations of speakers?
   They tend to have richer phonology, simpler morphology, more regular grammar, borrowed words, and are easier for adult learners.
8. What are some characteristics of languages with small populations of speakers?
   They tend to have simpler phonology, more complex morphology, less regular grammar, fewer borrowed words, and are harder for adult learners.
9. What sorts of language features were once thought to be universal but are now known to vary?
   Word order, grammatical categories, recursion, number words, nominative accusative structure, subject-prominence, and tense.
10. What are some constraints on language diversity?
    Anatomy of vocal tract and auditory system, and cognitive limitations due to brain architecture.
11. What are some ways languages evolve over time?
    Sound changes, grammaticalization, borrowing from other languages, semantic shifts, external contact, mishearings, misunderstandings, and innovations.

Summary