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[johnslat]

ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2010) � Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world.
The study argues that human languages may adapt more like biological organisms than previously thought and that the more common and popular the language, the simpler its construction to facilitate its survival.
Traditional thinking is that languages develop based upon random change and historical drift. For example, English and Turkish are very different languages based upon histories that separate them in space and time. For years, it has been the reigning assumption in the linguistic sciences.
The recent report, published in the current issue of PLoS One, offers a new hypothesis, challenging the drift explanation. Gary Lupyan, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, and Rick Dale, an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Memphis, conducted a large-scale statistical analysis of more than 2,000 of the world's languages aimed at testing whether certain social environments are correlated with certain linguistic properties.
The researchers found striking relationships between the demographic properties of a language -- such as its population and global spread -- and the grammatical complexity of those languages. Languages having the most speakers -- and those that have spread around the world -- were found to have far simpler grammars, specifically morphology, than languages spoken by few people and in circumscribed regions. For example, languages spoken by more than 100,000 people are almost six times more likely to have simple verb conjugations compared to languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people.
Larger populations tend to have simpler pronoun and number systems and a smaller number of cases and genders and in general do not employ complex prefixing or suffixing rules in their grammars. A consequence is that languages with long histories of adult learners have become easier to learn over time. Although a number of researchers have predicted such relationships between social and language structure, this is the first large-scale statistical test of this idea.
The results draw connections between the evolution of human language and biological organisms. Just as very distantly related organisms converge on evolutionary strategies in particular niches, languages may adapt to the social environments in which they are learned and used.
"English, for all its confusing spelling and exceptions -- if a baker bakes, what does a grocer do? -- has a relatively simple grammar," Lupyan said. "Verbs are easy to conjugate and nouns are mostly pluralized by adding 's.' In comparison, a West African language like Hausa has dozens of ways to make nouns plural and in many languages -- Turkish, Aymara, Ladakhi, Ainu -- verbs like 'to know' have to include information about the origin of the speaker's knowledge. This information is often conveyed using complex rules, which the most widely-spoken languages on earth like English and Mandarin lack."
Lupyan and Dale call this social affect on grammatical patterns the "Linguistic Niche Hypothesis." Languages evolve within particular socio-demographic niches. Although all languages must be learnable by infants, the introduction of adult learners to some languages (for example, through migration or colonization) means that aspects of a language difficult for adults to learn will be less likely to be passed on to subsequent generations of learners. The result is that languages spoken by more people over larger geographic regions have become morphologically simpler over many generations.
A remaining puzzle is why languages with few speakers are so complex in the first place. One possibility, explored by researchers, is that features such as grammatical gender and complex conjugational systems, while difficult for adult learners to master, may facilitate language learning in children by providing a network of redundant information that can cue children in on the meanings of words and how to string them together.
The results and theory proposed by Lupyan and Dale do not aim to explain why a specific language has the grammar it does. Because the findings are statistical in nature, many exceptions to Lupyan and Dale's theory can be identified. Their work, however, provides a comprehensive analysis of how some social factors influence the structure of language and shows that the relationships between language and culture is far from arbitrary.
The study was funded by an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training award to the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at Penn and by the National Science Foundation."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121140347.htm

Hmm, guess that means English is relatively simple.

Regards,
John

[fluffyhamster]

[Stephen Jones]

[mmcmorrow]

This is really a very silly study. If the study had looked at the situation in, for instance, AD 50 - very recently in the history of languages - they would have found that the dominant language over the whole of Europe had complex conjugations and case grammar. It's political power, technological advantages and fortuitous circumstances that lead to dominance by certain countries - and this dominance then leads to their language spreading. To suggest that somehow the inherent quality of the language is really a significant factor in this spread is simply daft. You could do a global statistical study showing that people with blue eyes are significantly more likely to own a plasma tv than those with brown eyes. Maybe so - but only an idiot would jump to the conclusion that blue-eyedness in itself made any difference to a person's ability to buy a plasma tv.

The authors also seem to equate morphology with grammar. What theory of grammar are they basing this on? One of the major perspectives in modern linguistics - Hallidayan or System Functional Linguistics - rejects the distinction between grammar and lexis completely - they refer to 'lexicogrammar'. If you look at the lexicogrammar of English, I think you'd agree it's hardly simple. Take the 5000 or so phrasal verbs, for instance. And what about the phonology? English, with it's 40 odd phonemes may be a long way off San (from South Africa) with its 80 odd (all those clicks), but is probably about midrange for world languages - its 20 vowels in particular are far from being a sleek and minimalist sound system.

That's not to say that there aren't interesting connections to be drawn between language structure and historical events. For instance, chipping off inflections does seem to be associated with creolisation of languages. So, Afrikaans has fewer inflections than Dutch, for instance. English itself went through a period of creolisation between the 900s and 1100s when the country's Anglo-Saxon social systems were shaken up and Norse and Norman French became dominant in various regions and domains of use. What had been a highly inflected language emerged as one where concepts previously expressed 'grammatically' were now expressed lexically. The -s plural - originally only the ending of one class of nouns - became generalised to nearly all nouns, with only remnants of the old classes remaining in very common nouns like 'children' and 'geese'. Even as late as the 1400s William Caxton was complaining that he sometimes didn't know what to print because in Kent, for instance, some people said 'egges' and some people continued with the older -en plural 'eyren'. Well, as it happened, Kentish and the other dialects were swept aside by the East Midlands dialect, which crucially included London, and away went even the inflections that had clung on around the country.

Anyway, you can read about all this in any books on the history of the English language. The fact is that the changes in English grammar happened a long time ago when the language and its people were very minor and peripheral figures in the history of Europe and were thoroughly knocked about by the forces of history. Several hundred years later, England went on to become a major world power and its language went global, not because of any lack of a dative, but rather the advantage of a navy and the industrial revolution.

Martin McMorrow, Auckland, NZ

[johnslat]

Dear Stephen,

"Well, let's look at requests in English. The modal verb used, whether the question is a direct or an indirect one, and other words in the request, depend on the assymetrical social distance between the speakers, the value of the thing requested and the transactional history between the two speakers.

Doesn't seem that simple to me.

The problem is that the authors of the study, like John, are presuming that grammaticalization equals complexity, and I'm not sure that's true unless you are an adult learner of the language? The fact that the auxiliary verb in French or Spanish has become part of the main verb in the future, doesn't seem to me to add any extra levels of complexity."

I suppose I'm really going to have to start including "Irony Alert" in parentheses. My opinion of this study is much like that of Martin McMorrow's.

Another point - your example of requests seems a bit dated to me. Way back when I was in school, considerable emphasis was placed on "formal/informal requests ( "Could you please," "Would you please" versus "Can you")
These days, at least in my experience, there simply isn't nearly as much
of a distinction made.
"Formality," I'd say, tends to be decreasing and this

"The modal verb used, whether the question is a direct or an indirect one, and other words in the request, depend on the assymetrical social distance between the speakers, the value of the thing requested and the transactional history between the two speakers."

appears to have become increasingly irrelevant.

Regards,
John

[fluffyhamster]

The merits or otherwise of the study aside, would anyone really really enjoy the thought of studying something like Navaho, Tuyuca, Inuit, or Dyirbal, if any one of them somehow suddenly became the "language" leading the world? (And I mean, try to imagine that you are Joe Dough working for the forseeable future on the line at the tuna cannery - unless of course you can, in between after-work beers pizzas and telly, master the complex foreign language and get promoted to head union go-between or something - rather than an academically very excitable linguist type).

[johnslat]

Dear fluffyhamster,

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to believe that despite some frustrating aspects - it's enormous and ever-increasing vocabulary, its ridiculous spelling system, and its pronunciation problems -
English is, relatively speaking, about mid-range in acquisition difficulty (but, of course, so many other factors enter in, especially the native-tongue of the person who is trying to learn English.)

Also, while acquiring functional English may not be too difficult, achieving fluency is, of course, much harder (I'm still working on that myself.)

Regards,
John

[fluffyhamster]

Sure John, English can be tricky - it's versus its etc etc. One thing it (and languages with similar orthographies) got right though is the concept of there generally being a space between written words (though there are still some grey areas - to hyphenate or nay and all that), not that this amazing innovation would help if your language's verbs say were all dozens of packed-in characters and concepts long!

[Stephen Jones]

[johnslat]

Dear Stephen,

"whilst the points on the scale may have slid more towards informality, they scale is still relevant."

Well, gee - I thought that was pretty much what I wrote.

""Formality," I'd say, tends to be decreasing and this . . . . appears to have become increasingly irrelevant."

So, your "Not in the least" seems something of an overstatement.

Regards,
John

[fluffyhamster]

[rogerwallace]

When I am 8000 miles from home, I am not in my own environs. I am in someone elses, and feel like I should be more accepting and less confrontalional than I might tend to be at home.
With young students I need to model behavior suitable to a classroom and culture. I don't need to complicate the subject anymore than it is for these young people. And yes, I do tend to be more informal than my parents generation and I am ok with that. I remember when I lived in Sommerset,UK- they said I talked funny but liked me anyway 'cuz I was real...