Although there are many different languages around the world, their grammar often has similar structures, a new analysis of over 2,000 languages has found. According to this, there are 60 grammatical patterns that occur in all languages. These language universals include, for example, structures such as word orders. These findings suggest that despite its diversity, human communication follows the same rules, at least in principle, to enable mutual understanding.
There are around 7,000 languages worldwide, each with their own sounds, rhythms and words. However, they also follow certain rules and patterns. But how similar are these patterns and how similar are the grammatical properties of the languages in particular? A team led by Annemarie Verkerk from Saarland University investigated this. To do this, they used a database in which over a hundred linguists have compiled and documented the characteristics of more than 2,400 languages from around the world.
Basic similarities in human communication
Verkerk’s team looked for common structures and patterns in this huge sample. Specifically, they compared 191 grammatical patterns, the so-called language universals. “We applied several very complex statistical procedures to this database to find out where the language universals previously defined as hypotheses can be recognized as patterns,” explains Verkerk. The researchers cite word order as an example of such universals, i.e. where verbs and objects appear in a sentence. In German, for example, objects usually appear after the verb, in Japanese it is the other way around and the verb even appears at the end of the sentence. This also goes hand in hand with the order of adpositions and nouns: Where there are prepositions before a noun in German, such words follow as postpositions after a noun in Japanese. “For these language universals, we were able to use Bayesian statistics to find out how likely they are to be recognized as grammatical patterns in the different languages,” explains the linguist.
The result: The team found around a third, specifically 60, of the 191 grammatical patterns in all languages examined. These universals can therefore be found as recurring patterns in all languages. This means that many languages are based on similar grammar. Conversely, the finding also means that most of the language theories put forward turned out to be wrong: “Many proposed universals are artifacts of the non-independence of features between closely related or neighboring languages,” the team writes.
Beyond these neighborhood effects, there are also remarkable global patterns, as the analysis shows for the first time in a statistically reliable manner. “This makes it clear that the evolution of languages is not random,” says Verkerk. She and her colleagues suspect that there are firmly established structures according to which people organize their communication because these have proven to be the best solution for human dialogue and mutual understanding. “We were able to show that languages tend to have a limited number of preferred grammatical solutions due to shared cognitive and communicative conditions,” says senior author Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
Timeline development is still unclear
In follow-up studies, the team wants to further analyze the changes in individual languages over time in order to better understand similarities and parallel developments. “We should also consider how languages have changed over the course of evolution and what social, ecological and demographic events and situations affected language development,” says Verkerk. To do this, they also want to use large data sets in order to be able to make clear statistical statements and not fall victim to neighborhood effects.
Source: Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) et al.; Nature Human Behavior, doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02325-z and doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02355-7