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A team of researchers from Saarbrücken and Leipzig has examined around 1,700 languages to identify structures that might occur universally. Of 191 grammatical patterns – known as linguistic universals – one third were found to be present in the languages studied. The team, led by Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University and Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has published its findings in Nature Human Behaviour.
Natural languages follow certain patterns. To facilitate the analysis and comparison of these patterns, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig made the world’s largest database of grammatical features publicly available two years ago. This database, known as ‘Grambank’, was developed with contributions from over a hundred linguists worldwide and provides the foundation for the current study on shared characteristics among languages. ‘We used several highly complex statistical methods to analyse the Grambank data in order to identify which of the 191 hypothesized linguistic universals were consistently observed across all languages,’ explains Annemarie Verkerk, Junior Professor of Language Science at Saarland University. By using a variety of statistical approaches, the research team was able to achieve a level of statistical precision far beyond that offered by earlier studies.
‘Up until now, linguists have typically focused on languages that are geographically distant from one another to avoid excessive similarities within the same language family – for example, comparing Slavic languages not only with other Indo-European languages such as Italian and Romanian, but also with languages from, say, the Turkic or Afro-Asiatic language families,’ Verkerk notes. However, many of these previous studies not only restricted themselves to comparisons between a limited number of languages – resulting in reduced statistical significance – they also paid little attention to language history. ‘Our methods allow us to trace how languages have evolved over time and how they relate geographically to others. By making use of a kind of family tree for each individual language, we were able to exploit inter-language relationships to estimate how linguistic universals arise,’ explains Annemarie Verkerk.
Analyses from multiple perspectives confirmed that roughly one third of the 191 proposed universals appear as recurring patterns across all languages. ‘This is a clear indication that language evolution is not random. That’s why we need to continue studying language change to understand why so many languages share similar underlying grammatical structures. It seems very likely that there are deeply rooted principles governing how effective human communication systems are constructed,’ says Verkerk.
As an example of a language universal, Verkerk cites word order in sentences – whether verbs precede or follow objects and how this relates to other recurring patterns. In German, verbs typically precede the object, while in Japanese the reverse is true. A related feature is the order of adpositions and nouns. Adpositions are linking words that express a spatial or temporal relationship between a noun and other words or phrases in a sentence. German, for example, uses prepositions, which come before a noun or noun phrase, whereas Japanese uses postpositions, which come after a noun or noun phrase. The correlation between object–verb order and postpositions, as observed in Japanese, is among the strongest universals identified in the study. ‘Using Bayesian statistics, we calculated the probability that these universals can be recognized as grammatical patterns across different languages,’ explains Verkerk.
Verkerk‘s research colleague and a co-author of the study Russell Gray of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig explains how the team chose to present their results: ‘We debated whether we should present the findings as a “glass half-empty scenario” or as a “glass half-full”. Should we emphasize how many of the proposed universals lack robust statistical support, or should we highlight the solid evidence that we found for about a third of them?’ ‘Ultimately,’ says Gray, ‘we chose to focus on the recurring patterns and to demonstrate that human languages tend towards a limited set of preferred grammatical solutions, shaped by shared cognitive and communicative constraints.’
For future research in this field, Annemarie Verkerk recommends moving away from small samples of individual languages, focusing instead on large cross-linguistic datasets: ‘Future studies should not simply analyse dependencies between features appearing in multiple language systems, they should also consider how human languages have changed over time and which social, ecological and demographic factors have influenced their development.’
Junior Professor Annemarie Verkerk
Department of Language Science and Technology
Saarland University
Tel.: +49 681 302-2550
Email: annemarie.verkerk@uni-saarland.de
Professor D. Russell Gray
Director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Tel.: +40 341 3550-259
Email: russell_gray@eva.mpg.de
Annemarie Verkerk, Olena Shcherbakova, Hannah J. Haynie, Hedvig Skirgård, Christoph Rzymski, Quentin D. Atkinson, Simon J. Greenhill & Russell D. Gray: Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses, erschienen in “Nature Human Behaviour”: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02325-z
Research briefing ‘Shared universal pressures in the evolution of human languages’:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02355-7
https://www.uni-saarland.de/lehrstuhl/verkerk.html
https://www.eva.mpg.de/
Junior Professor Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University
Source: Thorsten Mohr
Copyright: Universität des Saarlandes
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Junior Professor Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University
Source: Thorsten Mohr
Copyright: Universität des Saarlandes
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