{"id":225314,"date":"2025-11-18T01:21:45","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T07:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/enduring-patterns-in-worlds-languages-one-third-of-grammatical-universals-stand-up-to-rigorous-testing"},"modified":"2025-11-18T01:21:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T07:21:45","slug":"enduring-patterns-in-worlds-languages-one-third-of-grammatical-universals-stand-up-to-rigorous-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/enduring-patterns-in-worlds-languages-one-third-of-grammatical-universals-stand-up-to-rigorous-testing","title":{"rendered":"Enduring patterns in world\u2019s languages: One-third of grammatical \u2018universals\u2019 stand up to rigorous testing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/enduring-patterns-in-worlds-languages-one-third-of-grammatical-universals-stand-up-to-rigorous-testing3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\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\u2014patterns thought to hold across all languages\u2014are statistically supported when examined with state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.<\/p>\n<p>An international team led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) used Grambank, 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<p>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\u2014a level of statistical rigor rarely achieved in previous work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<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\u2014patterns thought to hold across all languages\u2014are 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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}