Linguistic Diversity

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There are ~7,000 languages in the world today, and many more that have gone extinct. They vary widely in their phonology (sound systems), morphology (word formation), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (use in context).

A Sampling of Fun Facts

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

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

Exercise: Share some fun ones on the class Slack channel. (Remember that if you ask an LLM to generate some for you, you need to fact-check them!)

Language Diversity argues against Universal Grammar

The study of so many languages provides a good deal of evidence against Universal Grammar.

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: the Pirahã live in an extreme immediacy of experience culture that doesn’t narrate or discuss anything outside direct experience, so the language reflects that.
Absence of numbers and counting
Pirahã and Munduruku, among others, lack exact number words beyond (roughly) one, two, and many. So language reflects cultural practice and need, rather than numerical cognition being universal and hardwired.
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, 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. Nomintative-accusative is not a universal.
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 real cross-linguistic data was gathered at scale.

How Languages Change

TODO - vowel shifts, simplification, grammaticalization, borrowing, word shortening, reanalysis, contact, migration, splitting communities, and other mechanisms of language change.

You can find a bunch of language family tree charts and images on line. Here is one that is pretty nice:

Language Family Tree

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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 is Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument?
    Children acquire grammatical rules they have never seen exemplified in their input, which suggests that at least some linguistic knowledge is innate (the Language Acquisition Device). The stimulus is too impoverished for pure learning to account for the result.
  2. What does the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language demonstrate?
    That grammar can emerge spontaneously from social conditions alone — deaf children in 1980s Nicaragua, without an adult sign language model, invented a full grammatical sign language within one generation.
  3. What is the difference between the strong and weak versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Which is supported empirically?
    Strong (linguistic determinism): language determines thought — we cannot think what we cannot say. Now largely discredited. Weak (linguistic relativity): language influences habitual thought. This is supported empirically, e.g., color term differences affecting discrimination speed.
  4. What are the three types of signs identified by Charles Sanders Peirce?
    Icons (resemble what they represent), Indices (causally connected to their referent), Symbols (arbitrary, conventional).

Summary

We’ve covered:

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