Linguists have long been interested in language variation. What are the common or universal patterns between languages? What limits the possible variation between them? Grambank, the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of language structure, allows researchers to answer some of these questions.
Grambank was built in an international collaboration between the Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and Nijmegen, the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Turku, the University of Kiel, the University of Uppsala, SOAS, the Documentation of Endangered Languages Programme, and over a hundred academics from around the world. Grambank’s coverage spans 215 different language families and 101 isolates from all inhabited continents. “The design of the feature questionnaire initially required numerous revisions to encompass many of the various solutions that languages have evolved to encode grammatical properties,” says Hedvig Skirgård, who coordinated much of the coding and is the study’s lead author.
Variation Limits
The team settled on 195 grammatical properties, ranging from word order to whether or not a language has gender pronouns. For example, many languages have separate pronouns for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but some also have masculine and feminine versions of ‘I’ or ‘you’. The possible “design space” would be enormous if the grammatical properties varied freely. Boundaries of variation could be related to cognitive principles rooted in memory or learning, making some grammatical structures more likely than others. The boundaries could also be related to historical ‘accidents’, such as descent from a common language or contact with other languages.
The researchers discovered much greater flexibility in the combination of grammatical features than many theorists have supposed. “Languages can vary considerably in a quantifiable way, but not without limits,” explains Stephen Levinson, director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and one of the founders of the Grambank project. “A sign of the extraordinary diversity of the 2,400 languages in our sample is that only five of them occupy the same location in design space (they share the same grammatical properties).”
Languages show much greater similarity to those with a common ancestor than to those with which they are in contact. “Genealogy usually trumps geography,” says Russell Gray, director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution and lead author of the study. “However, if the processes of linguistic evolution and diversification were to run again from the beginning, there would still be some resemblance to what we have now. The limitations of human cognition mean that while there is a great deal of historical contingency in the organization of grammatical structures, there are also regular patterns”.
diversity under threat
“The extraordinary diversity of languages is one of humanity’s greatest cultural endowments,” concludes Levinson. “This endowment is under threat, especially in some areas such as northern Australia and parts of South and North America. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition and culture It will be seriously fragmented.”
The Grambank Database is a comprehensive open access resource maintained by the Max Planck Society. “It puts linguistics on a par with genetics, archeology, and anthropology in terms of accessible, large-scale, quantitative data,” says Gray. “I hope it will facilitate exploration of the links between linguistic diversity and a wide range of other cultural and biological traits, ranging from religious beliefs to economic behavior, musical traditions, and genetic lineages. These links to other facets of behavior will make Grambank a key resource not only in linguistics, but in the multidisciplinary effort to understand human diversity.