Linguistic variation

'Linguistic variation' refers to the range of differences among the languages of the world. The study of such variation is a major branch of linguistics.

The nature of variation is very important to an understanding of human linguistic ability in general: if human linguistic ability restricts itself narrowly constrained by biological properties of humans, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability has no such constraints, then languages might vary greatly in many aspects.

In principle, if two languages share some property, that property might reflect descent with modification from a precursor language or some inherent property of the human language faculty. For example, the Latin language spoken by the Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy. Similarities between Spanish and Italian in many cases reflect both having descended from Roman Latin.

Often, linguists can dismiss the likelihood common inheritance. Presumably humans have spoken languages at least from the time biologically modern humans emerged, perhaps more than a hundred thousand years ago. Independent measures of language change (for example, comparing the language of ancient texts to the daughter languages spoken today) suggest that change is rapid enough to make it extremely difficult to reconstruct a language that was spoken so long ago. As a consequence, linguists cannot with confidence always attribute common features of languages spoken in different parts of the world as evidence for common ancestry.

Even more striking, there are documented cases of sign languages being developed in communities of congenitally deaf people who could not have been exposed to spoken language. The properties of these sign languages have been shown to conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages, strengthening the hypothesis that those properties are not due to common ancestry but to more general characteristics of the way languages are learned.

Loosely speaking, the collection of properties which all languages share can be referred to as "universal grammar" (or UG). However, there is much debate around this topic and the term is used in several different ways.

Universal properties of language may be partly due to universal aspects of human experience; for example all humans experience water, and the fact that all human languages have a word for water is probably not unrelated to this fact. The challenging questions regarding universal grammar generally require one to control this factor. Clearly, experience is part of the process by which individuals learn languages. But experience by itself is not enough, since animals raised around people learn extremely little human language, if any at all.

A more interesting example is this: suppose that all human languages distinguish nouns from verbs (this is generally believed to be true). This would require a more sophisticated explanation, since nouns and verbs do not exist in the world, apart from languages that make use of them.

In general, a property of UG could be due to general properties of human cognition, or due to some property of human cognition that is specific to language. Too little is understood about human cognition in general to allow a meaningful distinction to be made. As a result, generalizations are often stated in theoretical linguistics without a stand being taken on whether the generalization could have some bearing on other aspects of cognition.

In an interview for New Scientist, Noam Chomsky, pioneer of the concept of universal grammar, said:

There are people who misunderstand the term ['universal grammar'] but I can't deal with that. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

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NB: This article uses content that originally appeared on Wikipedia.

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