New study finds one-third of grammatical 'universals' stand up to rigorous testing
The evolution of a word-order universal on the global language tree. In our analysis of the universal1 "With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal subject-object-verb order are postpositional", the absence or presence of the two features defines the 'state': state 11 (red) is the prediction made by the universal; in state 00 (black), both features are absent; in states 01 (orange) and 10 (light blue), one feature is absent and the other is present. The ancestral state reconstruction shows that in multiple language families and areas, pathways of language change repeatedly lead to the predicted outcome.
© Verkerk et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2025)
To the Point
- Linguistic universals: Of the 191 proposed linguistic universals, about one-third are statistically supported across more than 1,700 languages.
- A wealth of data and state-of-the-art statistical methods: Using Grambank and Bayesian statistical models that control for genealogical and geographic influences, the strongest evidence emerges for patterns of word order and hierarchical agreement.
- Evolutionary framework: The repeated evolution of these patterns suggests there are shared cognitive and communicative constraints, which narrows the search for truly universal features of human language.
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 "linguistic universals" - patterns thought to hold across all languages - are statistically supported when examined with state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.
An international team led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) used Grambank, the world's 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.
However, sampling can fail to remove all dependencies, reduce statistical power and does not identify historical pathways. The Bayesian spatio-phylogenetic analyses used by the authors accounted for both the genealogical and geographic non-independence of languages - a level of statistical rigour rarely achieved in previous work.
Languages do not evolve at random
"In the face of huge linguistic diversity, it is intriguing to find that languages don't evolve at random," says Verkerk. "I am delighted that the different types of analyses we did converged on very similar results, suggesting that language change must be a central component in explaining universals."
The study found strong evidence for patterns involving word order (such as whether verbs precede or follow objects) and hierarchical universals (such as dependencies in which arguments are marked in grammatical agreement). The patterns predicted by the supported universals have evolved repeatedly across the world's languages, suggesting deep-rooted constraints in how humans structure communication.
Senior author Russell Gray reflected, "We discussed whether to write this up as a glass-half-empty paper - 'look how many proposed universals don't hold' - or a glass-half-full paper - 'there's robust statistical support for about a third'. In the end, we chose to highlight the patterns that evolve repeatedly, showing that shared cognitive and communicative pressures push languages towards a limited set of preferred grammatical solutions."
By demonstrating which universals truly hold up under evolutionary scrutiny, the study narrows the field for future research into the cognitive and communicative foundations of human language.
