Is English the easiest language?
Has evolution streamlined the ‘global language’?
To paraphrase Steven Pinker we are born with the capacity to learn a language — regardless of how difficult it may appear in a text book. A child growing up in Japan will learn (spoken) Japanese as easily one in France will master French
About the comparative difficulty of different foreign languages there is less consensus. The linguist, David Crystal, argues:
All languages have a complex grammar: there may be relative simplicity in one respect (e.g., no word-endings), but there seems always to be relative complexity in another (e.g., word-position)
The main basis for the claim that English is ‘easy’ is its morphological structure. Morphology breaks words into morphemes or parts.
The word unkindness, for example, consists of a root or stem (kind). a prefix (un) and a suffix (ness). A change in one of these morphemes or their addition/subtraction creates a new word. An example would be to add another suffix es to create a plural: unkindnesses
Inflexion
Linguists describe English as a ‘weakly inflected’ language. This means that the form of a word changes less frequently. French nouns, for example, are either masculine or feminine and this dictates the article that precedes them le stylo, la maison (the pen, the house)
For personal pronouns, English has three cases subjective case (I, you, he etc), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them) possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers etc).
Other languages have many more variants. In Basque, for example, these include the number of persons and the formality of the mode of address.
There are fourteen cases to learn in Estonian, one less than in Finnish.
Students of Hungarian wrestle with eighteen cases. And over in the Caucuses, the people of Dagestan use thirty cases in Tsez.
Irregular
English language learners may need to memorise fewer word formation rules but there are other criteria to consider. Languages have multiple phonological, syntactic, and semantic features.
In English the grammatical structure and syntax is essentially Anglo-Saxon. A substantial percentage of the lexicon (vocabulary) consists of loanwords from other languages.
This creates oddities in the pattern of verb formation. There are many thousands of regular verbs (I paint, you painted etc) and only around 180 irregular verbs in English. Yet these irregulars dominate usage. The top ten most frequently spoken verbs are all irregular — see here. In fact 70% of the most heavily used verbs are irregular.
You can add ed to the majority of verbs to form the past simple. But this rule will not help you conjugate to be, to speak or to get.
Bigger the better?
Languages with fewer native speakers often have a reputation for being difficulty to master. Basque, Irish and Hungarian are commonly cited examples.
In 2010 the linguists Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale published Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure. This study analysed more that 2,000 languages, paying particular attention to the demographic context of each one. Factors considered included the number of speakers and their geographical distribution.
Counter-intuitively, the study found that more widely used languages tend to be less structurally complex.:
Languages spoken by smaller populations tend to employ more complex inflectional systems. Languages spoken by larger populations tend to avoid complex morphological paradigms, employing lexical constructions instead.
Esperanto
Esperanto is an attempt to create a user-friendly universal language. It is a no frills challenger to all languages when it comes to structural simplicity, with no grammatical gender, and nominal inflections.
It also boasts regularised phonics — no cough to deal with or silent letters. Vocabulary is based on Indo-European languages, with the majority of words immediately familiar to the speakers of Romance languages.
Yet after more than century Esperanto no nearer world (language) domination. It has a respectable number of speakers (up to two million by some estimates) but is still perceived as a hobbyist language rather than a serious contender as a lingua franca. This would suggest that accessibility is only one factor in attracting custom in the linguistic marketplace.
Why English?
So what is the secret sauce that gives English the edge over other languages? Clearly the economic, diplomatic and military power of first Britain and then the USA was crucial in establishing its dominance. And once established as the lingua franca in so many areas: medicine, science, business etc — it has a momentum that would be difficult to reverse.
Nonetheless, it is true that English is many respects an accommodating language for beginners, thanks to the relative simplicity of its case rules and its syntactical flexibility.
Another bonus is that grammatical conventions are not backed by an English language academy policing usage. The sentence I would have went to the cinema may make purists wince but its meaning is still clear.
Many ‘rules’ have fallen into disuse. Journalists regularly ignore the convention that you should not begin a sentence with a preposition. Nor can anyone stop you splitting the infinitive. If Captain Kirk wants to boldly explore new worlds then so be it.
Not quite so easy
Bear traps await English language learners, however. One that causes great difficulty is the use of the direct article — fine to go to the prison, not so welcome to go to prison. Then there is the sheer size of the English vocabulary (those twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary). That’s great for poets but somewhat daunting if you are facing an exam.
The most intimidating feature of that word mountain is the vast number of phrasal verbs. Without getting into the technicalities, a phrasal verb changes meaning by adding a preposition to the root verb. These are maddeningly illogical for English language learners who often don’t get on with phrasal verbs. You can’t get out of/get away from memorising them.
