A recent analysis of humanity's major language families has cast doubt on the long-held notion of language's universality, which was said to be dictated by common linguistic structures in human brains. Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, teamed up with Russell Gray, a computational linguist at the University of Auckland, to test the universality of language. They used powerful computational tools to calculate the most likely relationships among sets of data. Dunn and Gray treated features of language such as subject-verb order as traits, analyzing Austronesian, Indo-European, Bantu and Uto-Aztecan language groups. These groups span thousands of years and contain more than 2,400 of about 7,000 human languages. The results from the analysis suggest that "each language family is evolving according to its own set of rules," Dunn told the magazine Wired. "Some were similar, but none were the same. There is much more diversity, in terms of evolutionary processes, than anybody ever expected." If language trends are universal, then each language family should have evolved similarly. Dunn and Gray's findings suggest otherwise, however. The results of this study suggest that cultural evolution, rather than the brain, may be more responsible for language development.
-compiled by Faiza Arif
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