Linguistic bots explain why big groups produce simple grammar

Enlarge / But nobody can explain Welsh. (credit: flickr user: Groundhopping Merseburg)

A funny thing happens to languages that have huge numbers of speakers: over time, they seem to simplify. They lose all the fiddly bits that make languages like Hungarian so incredibly hard to learn, and instead become more regular and grammatically simple.

But at the same time that the grammatical challenge of these languages shrinks, their vocabulary explodes. This leaves a mystery for researchers who study how language structures emerge in humans: why does population size seem to drive increased complexity in vocabulary but reduced complexity in grammar? There are some intuitive answers to this question, but we need to confirm whether those intuitions are backed up by data.

Evolutionary linguists Florencia Reali, Nick Chater, and Morten Christiansen have used a computational simulation to suggest an answer: the two different kinds of complexity are very different in how easy they are to learn, and they're passed on to others through conversation. Their results imply that "language, and possibly other aspects of culture, may become simpler at the structural level as our world becomes increasingly interconnected," they write.

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