{"id":5675,"date":"2026-04-17T15:38:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T19:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/?p=5675"},"modified":"2026-04-17T15:39:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T19:39:03","slug":"enduring-patterns-in-the-worlds-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/enduring-patterns-in-the-worlds-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Enduring patterns in the world\u2019s languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">New study finds one-third of grammatical \u2018universals\u2019 stand up to rigorous testing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-right\"><strong>The Max Planck Society<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p>Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical patterns appear again and again. A new study reveals that around a third of the long-proposed \u201clinguistic universals\u201d \u2014 patterns thought to hold across all languages \u2014 are statistically supported when examined with state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An international team led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) used&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/grambank.clld.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Grambank<\/a>, the world\u2019s most comprehensive database of grammatical features, to test 191 proposed universals across more than 1,700 languages. Traditionally, linguists have attempted to circumvent the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages by sampling widely separated languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, sampling can&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mpg.de\/25723124\/1114-evan-enduring-patterns-in-the-world-s-languages-150495-x\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Original publication:<\/strong> <br>Verkerk, A., Shcherbakova, O., Haynie, H. J., Skirg\u00e5rd, H., Rzymski, C., Atkinson, Q. D., Greenhill, S. J., &amp; Gray, R. D. (2026). Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses. <em>Nature Human Behaviour<\/em>, <em>10<\/em>(1), 126-136. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1038\/s41562-025-02325-z <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\"><p>New study finds one-third of grammatical \u2018universals\u2019 stand up to rigorous testing The Max Planck Society Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/enduring-patterns-in-the-worlds-languages\/\" title=\"Enduring patterns in the world\u2019s languages\">[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[559,561,560],"class_list":["post-5675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actualidad","category-3-articulos","tag-grammar","tag-human-languages","tag-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5677,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5675\/revisions\/5677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}