The number of grammatical differences that various languages create varies
widely around the globe. Even amongst languages that are closely related,
this variance can be seen. For instance, the phrase hunden, which means "the
dog," is used interchangeably by speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian
to indicate that a dog has been located or that food has been given to it.
In contrast, the nominative, accusative, and dative cases in Icelandic would
be expressed using three separate word forms, respectively: hundurinn,
hundinn, and hundinum.
Along with many other differences, this grammatical divergence in the case
system distinguishes Icelandic from its closely related sibling languages.
According to the first author Olena Shcherbakova from the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, "One well-known theory about why
some languages show more complex grammar than others links grammatical
complexity to the social environments in which these languages are
used."
For instance, the more over 350,000 residents in the area mostly learn and
utilize Icelandic. These comparatively small, remote towns are also known as
"societies of intimates." The other Scandinavian nations, which are close to
their neighbors, have greater populations and significant percentages of
non-native speakers.
These groups are referred to as "societies of strangers." Many linguists
assert that languages with a higher percentage of non-native speakers tend
to simplify their grammars because, in contrast to children, adult learners
find it difficult to absorb complicated grammatical structures necessary for
mastering their new language's nuances.
But does the tremendous linguistic variety found in the globe extend to
Iceland? The Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology conducted
research to determine if language grammars tend to become more
straightforward in bigger communities of strangers that contain a high
percentage of non-native speakers.
They used information from Grambank, a recently released worldwide database
of grammatical traits, to calculate the grammatical complexity of 1,314
languages for their study, which was published in Science Advances. These
complexity ratings were contrasted with information on the proportion of
non-native speakers of each language.
Complexity definition
There are several competing theories on language complexity, which is a
widely discussed subject in linguistics. According to Hedvig Skirgrd of the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, "many of the
disagreements are due to differences in how 'complexity' is defined."
In this work, we refined the approach by isolating two independent
measures: informativity (the number of distinctions made) and fusion (the
number of affixes verbs and nouns contain).
The findings demonstrate that unfamiliar civilizations do not speak less
complicated languages. As opposed to this, Shcherbakova claims that "our
study shows that the variation in grammatical complexity generally
accumulates too slowly to adapt to the immediate environment."
German is a well-known example of how social context does not influence
grammatical complexity. German has preserved its case system and many other
grammatical characteristics despite being studied and spoken by many
non-native speakers.
The study examines how social context affects linguistic complexity while
taking into consideration the anticipated parallels resulting from both
contact and genealogical inheritance. Our work emphasizes the need of
employing extensive data and taking into consideration the impact of
heredity and interaction when resolving persistent concerns about the
development of languages. It demonstrates how conventional language
knowledge can be systematically examined using increasingly accessible
global datasets," says University of Auckland's Simon Greenhill.
