{"id":47477,"date":"2019-04-12T12:50:10","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T19:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=47477"},"modified":"2019-04-12T12:50:10","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T19:50:10","slug":"linguists-found-the-weirdest-languages-and-english-is-one-of-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/linguists-found-the-weirdest-languages-and-english-is-one-of-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguists found the weirdest languages \u2013 and English is one of them"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nIs English \u201cweird\u201d? Many of us\u00a0might feel this is true<\/a>\u00a0when we\u2019re trying to explain the complex spelling rules of the language, or the meanings of idioms such as \u201cit\u2019s raining cats and dogs\u201d to someone who is learning English. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task.<\/p>\n

But what is a \u201cweird\u201d language anyway? I am a linguist and we generally aim to be as objective as possible in the study of human language. We view ourselves\u00a0as language scientists<\/a>\u00a0who make hypotheses about how humans use language and test them against linguistic data. Unlike so-called \u201clanguage police<\/a>\u201d, we believe it is important to avoid where possible making value judgements about language.<\/p>\n

Some computational linguists have, however, used data in\u00a0the World Atlas of Language Structures<\/a>\u00a0(WALS) to explore\u00a0which languages might be considered the \u201cweirdest\u201d<\/a>. This was not just a value judgement: they systematically compared the information in the WALS website for 239 languages from different parts of the world.<\/p>\n

Their aim was to find out which languages had the largest number of features that differed most from other languages. In this survey, English came in 33rd position out of 239 languages. So it was definitely \u201cweirder\u201d than over 80% of the other languages in the survey.<\/p>\n

Critics though have claimed the survey indulged\u00a0in cherry-picking<\/a>\u00a0only a few features of the world\u2019s many languages. Indeed, there are features of English that are not \u201cweird\u201d compared to many other languages, such as its basic\u00a0subject-verb-object word order<\/a>. But let\u2019s look here at two features of English that might in fact be unusual.<\/p>\n

English sounds strange<\/strong><\/h4>\n

English probably sounds a little \u201cweird\u201d to many speakers of other languages. According to the WALS, the average number of distinctive speech sounds in the world\u2019s languages is about 25-30 \u2013 known as \u201cphonemes\u201d.\u00a0Pirah\u00e3<\/a>, an indigenous language spoken in the Amazon region of Brazil, has an unusually small set of phonemes. It has eight consonants, and just three vowels: \/i\/, \/a\/ and \/o\/. In contrast,\u00a0Taa \u2013 also known as !X\u00f3\u00f5)<\/a>\u00a0is a language in southern Africa which has more than 100 phonemes, including many different types of click sounds. Sign languages, such as British Sign Language or\u00a0American Sign Language<\/a>, do not use sounds at all. Signs are, instead, composed out of combinations of handshapes, movements of the hands, and locations on or near the body of the signer.
\n

\"\"

Only 6,000 people in the world speak Chalcatongo Mixtec \u2013 considered to be the \u2018world\u2019s weirdest language\u2019. Pexels<\/p><\/div>
\nEnglish has more phonemes than many languages,\u00a0with around 44<\/a>, depending on which variety of English you speak. It has an unusually large set of vowel sounds \u2013 there are around 11. According to WALS, most spoken languages only have\u00a0between five to six vowel sounds<\/a>. This is part of the reason that English spelling is fiendishly complicated, because it has inherited five letters for vowels from the Roman alphabet and speakers have to make them work for more than twice that number of sounds.<\/p>\n

English has some comparatively unusual consonant sounds as well. Two sounds, those represented by the \u201cth\u201d in \u201cbath\u201d and \u201cbathe\u201d respectively, are found\u00a0in fewer than 10% of the languages surveyed<\/a>\u00a0in WALS. In fact, these two sounds are generally\u00a0among the last sounds acquired by children<\/a>, with some adult varieties of English not using them at all.<\/p>\n

The question of questions<\/strong><\/h4>\n

English grammar is also \u201cweird\u201d. English uses varying word orders to distinguish between questions and statements \u2013 meaning that the subject of the sentence precedes the verb in statements. Take the phrase \u201clife is a box of chocolates\u201d for example. Here, the order is subject (\u201clife\u201d) followed by the verb (\u201cis\u201d). In the question, \u201cis life a box of chocolates?\u201d, the order of these elements is reversed.<\/p>\n

In a WALS survey of 955 languages,\u00a0fewer than 2% of languages in the sample<\/a>\u00a0used English-like differences in sentence structure for questions. Over 50% of the languages added a question particle to differentiate a question from a statement.<\/p>\n

In Japanese, for example, you add the question particle \u201cka\u201d to a statement to turn it into a question. The second most common strategy in WALS was to change the intonation pattern, such as changing a falling intonation pattern (for a statement) to a rising one (for a question). In contrast, Mixtec (an indigenous language of Mexico) is a highly atypical language because it does not use any grammatical strategy to distinguish between questions and statements.<\/p>\n

That said, it is impossible to conclusively make the argument that English is, or isn\u2019t, \u201cweird\u201d because all the data needed to make this judgement is not available. As several thousand languages have not yet been included in WALS, this means WALS can only be used to compare English with a small proportion of\u00a0the estimated 7000 languages<\/a>\u00a0in the world today. So more\u00a0language documentation<\/a>\u00a0is ultimately needed to give a better understanding of the world\u2019s amazing linguistic diversity.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Adam Schembri is a Reader in Linguistics, Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is English \u201cweird\u201d? Many of us\u00a0might feel this is true\u00a0when we\u2019re trying to explain the complex spelling rules of the language, or the meanings of idioms such as \u201cit\u2019s raining cats and dogs\u201d to someone who is learning English. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task. But what is a \u201cweird\u201d […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":47478,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14157],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-47477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-linguistics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLinguists found the weirdest languages \u2013 and English is one of them - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/linguists-found-the-weirdest-languages-and-english-is-one-of-them\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Linguists found the weirdest languages \u2013 and English is one of them - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Is English \u201cweird\u201d? Many of us\u00a0might feel this is true\u00a0when we\u2019re trying to explain the complex spelling rules of the language, or the meanings of idioms such as \u201cit\u2019s raining cats and dogs\u201d to someone who is learning English. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task. 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