Grambank Shows the Diversity of the World's Languages
An international team has created a new database that documents patterns of grammatical variation in over 2400 of the world’s languages
What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages. The project was initiated by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in collaboration with a team of over a hundred linguists from around the world.
Publication: HEDVIG SKIRGÅRD, et al., Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss, SCIENCE ADVANCES (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6175
Original Story Source: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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