Making Sense of Babel

The diversity of languages in the world may imply a certain element of selection.

From mythology to science, the diversity of languages has been one of the conundrums of human society. The Book of Genesis tells the tale of how humans after the Great Flood flourished in Babylon, speaking a single language. In their hubris they decided, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.’

A displeased God ‘confounded’ the language of the builders of the Tower of Babel and spread them across the world.

Linguists have often explained this diversity through random change and drift, arguing that even languages from the same linguistic family such as Hindi and English have separated through time and space. While there is some truth in this argument, researchers Gary Lupyan, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, and Rick Dale, an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Memphis, have collated evidence that suggests that a process akin to selecting for fitness that applies to biological organisms may also apply to the evolution and spread of languages.

Their statistical analysis of 2,000 of the world’s languages shows that in general the popularity of a language is correlated to its grammatic structure, with less complex languages being more popular. Languages spoken by more than 100,000 people are almost six times more likely to have simple verb conjugations compared to languages spoken by fewer than 100,000 people.

“English, for all its confusing spelling and exceptions—if a baker bakes, what does a grocer do?—has a relatively simple grammar,” Lupyan says. “Verbs are easy to conjugate and nouns are mostly pluralised by adding ‘s.’ In comparison, a West African language like Hausa has dozens of ways to make nouns plural and in many languages—Turkish, Aymara, Ladakhi, Ainu — verbs like ‘to know’ have to include information about the origin of the speaker’s knowledge. This information is often conveyed using complex rules, which the most widely-spoken languages on earth like English and Mandarin lack.”

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