2023-08-18 12:04:38
MADRID, 18 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
a new study has challenged the claim of many linguists that languages spoken by many non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars.
Analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig found that the size of the language community and the proportion of second language speakers they were not associated with simpler grammars.
Languages around the world differ greatly in the number of grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages.. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian speakers, for example, use the same word ‘hunden’, which means “the dog”, to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found it or gave it food. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum.
This grammatical distinction in the case system, along with many others, distinguishes Icelandic from its closely related sister languages. “A leading hypothesis for why some languages display more complex grammar than others links grammatical complexity to the social environments in which these languages are used,” he says. it’s a statement first author Olena Shcherbakova of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
For example, Icelandic is mainly learned and used by the local population of more than 350,000 people. These relatively small isolated communities are also called “intimate partnerships.” In contrast, the other Scandinavian countries, located very close to their neighbors, have larger populations with substantial proportions of non-native speakers. These communities are known as “stranger societies.” Many linguists have claimed that languages with more non-native speakers tend to simplify their grammar since, unlike children, adult learners struggle to acquire complex grammar rules to master the intricacies of their new language.
But is this Icelandic example representative of the amazing linguistic diversity around the world? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wanted to find out if language grammars tend to evolve more simply when spoken by larger societies of strangers with many non-native speakers.
They measured the grammatical complexity of 1,314 languages using data from Grambank, a recently launched global database of grammatical features. These complexity scores were compared to variables detailing the number of non-native speakers in these languages.
The complexity of language is a hotly debated topic in linguistics, with many different and opposing views. “A lot of the disagreements stem from differences in how ‘complexity’ is defined,” says Hedvig Skirg*rd of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “In this study, we improved the methodology by deciphering two distinct measures: fusion (how many affixes have verbs and nouns) and informativeness (how many distinctions are made).”
The results show that societies of strangers do not speak less complex languages. “Instead, our study reveals that variation in grammatical complexity generally accumulates too slowly to adapt to the immediate environment,” says Shcherbakova. The well-known counterexample to the claim that the social environment shapes grammatical complexity is German. German is learned and spoken by a large number of non-native speakers, and yet it retains its case system and many other grammatical distinctions.
The study tests the influence of the social environment on grammatical complexity, while also explaining the expected similarities that arise from both genealogical inheritance and contact. “Our study highlights the importance of using large-scale data and taking into account the influence of heredity and contact when addressing longstanding questions about the evolution of languages. It shows how received linguistic wisdom can be rigorously tested against global data sets that are becoming more and more available,” concludes Simon Greenhill from the University of Auckland.
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