all languages are the same if you think about it
making your language learning journey easier
Language is an essential part of (most people’s) life, and as it is, there are thousands of languages spread across the far reaches of the world. Obviously some are closer in relation compared to others: learning Portuguese as a Spanish speaker is a lot easier than if you spoke an unrelated language, like Japanese.
While it’s easy to point out the differences in these languages, sometimes it’s important to take a step back and help find some similarities that might make your language acquisition journey easier; additionally, comparing these features with your own native language can be fruitful.
These features are called “language universals,” and they help provide insights into the way language and its underlying structures are shared throughout the globe. They help uncover the fundamentals that exist, regardless of culture or geographic origins. Using these universals and other similarities throughout languages, language acquisition becomes a lot easier.
Phonology:
Starting from the basics, virtually every language has a distinction between the two core elements of consonants and vowels; these function as the building blocks of speech, and also show similarity throughout various languages. An easy way to understand how consonants and vowels work in a specific language is through the International Phonetics Alphabet Chart, or IPA Chart for short.
As you can see from the chart labeled Consonants (Pulmonic), much of the world’s languages share a specific inventory of consonants taken from this chart. These consonants can also be modified for aspiration / breathiness, stress, gemination, and more. Additionally, consonant inventories can include sounds like clicks and implosives. These inventories can be as simple as Hawaiian’s or as complex as Ubykh’s due to the amount of modifications and available consonants.
At the end of the day, many of these consonants exist in a lot of different languages, like the plosives / stops (p, t, k, b, d, g), or nasals (n, m). Finding these similarities in consonants and vowels between your native and target language is definitely useful, even if the languages aren’t directly related
Word Order
Word order is another major part of language universals: this is the order in which specific words (the verb, object, and subject) appear in a sentence.
Most languages are SOV, meaning the subject goes first, then object, then verb, in a typical sentence. For example, Korean and Latin are both SOV; one would say “I the apple ate” rather than “I ate the apple.” The latter example (“I ate the apple”) is SVO word order, in which the verb appears before the object: English and Spanish are two major examples of this. Most languages in the world can be categorized in some variation of these three letters–SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS.
When learning a language, it is essential you learn the word order, as it is a major part of any language. Understanding that lots languages have similar (or different!) word order as your native language is important to really grasp how the grammar works.
Grammatical Categories
Languages also have separate gramatical categories, like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. These allow us to describe different parts of the language with ease, and are often differentiated by other aspects like gender or plurality.
For example, if your language has some form of grammatical gender, like Spanish, it may be easy to learn another language with grammatical gender, like German. However, it’s important to remember that gender may not be the same in both languages: the bridge may be masculine in Spanish (el puente), but feminine in German (die Brücke).
At the end of the day, its important to remember that nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and more all exist for whatever language you’re learning, and distinguishing them by these categories may prove to be useful in the long run.
Questions
All languages have ways to form questions to seek information. Interrogative words (e.g., who, what, where) or question intonation are used to transform statements into questions, enabling communication to seek clarification or seek new information.
Questioning individuals may represent itself differently in various languages, but like all the other universals, it’s important to remember that it does exist. Question words and methods of questioning others are usually similar throughout families.
For example, in most Germanic languages, the main verb moves to the front of the sentence in question form. For example, this can be seen in Norwegian Did he eat? (Spiste han?; spiste meaning ate, and han meaning he). This can be seen in English in specific cases, like Are you here?, with the “to be” verb being moved to the front.
In some languages, the word order stays the same, but the tone at the end of the sentence changes: in Spanish, the sentence for He ate is Él comió, whereas saying Did he eat? is also Él comió?, but the tone at the end of the sentence rises (similar to English). Finding similarities like this across and within languages families can also speed up and ease your learning.
Pronouns
Using pronouns is an incredibly important language universal; to avoid using the same noun over and over again across multiply sentences, pronouns are utilized.
When learning a language, it is important that you learn the pronouns quickly. These are essential when speaking to individiuals regardless of language. In some cases, though, you may get away without having to use them, as is the case with pro-drop languages, in which the pronoun/person is indicated in the verb conjugation. Nevertheless, comparing pronouns with your language and your target language will prove fruitful as you learn the language.
Basic Color Terms
Colors obviously exist, and they are represented in every language. For example, there are usually colors for black/dark, white/bright, red, blue, yellow. Now with the increased mixing of groups together, more colors such as purple, orange, green, etc have found their way into more languages.
Many languages have similar words for the same color: take English red, Spanish rojo, Lithuanian raudona, etc. These words all stem from a Proto-Indo-European root, as they’re all related. Many languages may also borrow a word for a certain color from one language. This can be seen in the Indian words for blue: for example, Tamil nīlam, Hindi nīlā, Marathi niḷā, and Kannada nīli all come from the Sanskrit word for blue (nīlaḥ). As you can see colors are an easy way to find similarities between your native and target languages and take your next steps on this journey.
Kinship Terms
Family relationships are crucial in all societies, and thus, languages tend to have specific terms for various family members like mother, father, brother, and sister.
Kinship terms are the words used to represent familiar relationships. All languages tend to have different words for various family members, like the mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, etc.
If the target language you’re learning uses the same kinship system (meaning the same differences in relationship) as your native language, it becomes a lot easier to learn the terms. On the other hand, learning a system completely new may take some time and effort. For example, one of the most different kinship systems to English is the Dravidian kinship system, as seen below. Taking the time to learn these distinctions may be tedious, but the native speakers of your target language will definitely appreciate it.
These are just a few of the ways language universals and similarities among the languages can be used to boost your confidence when speaking and learning a new language. Although these languages may differ significantly in vocab, phonetics, grammar, and more, these universals can help bind us together, as human. Good luck!
