The Evolution of Complex Grammars: New Study Measures Grammatical Complexity of 1,314 Languages
27th June 2024
Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning “the dog,” to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. 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.
Icelandic is essentially Old Norse–Icelanders can read sagas from around 1000 AD with no difficulty–thus illustrating the surprising fact that languages on the fringes of a linguistic area tend to retain archaic features. The French spoken in Quebec is closer to the French of the 17th century than modern French, as the English spoken in Appalachia is closer to the English of the 17th century than modern British English.