Pick any two languages on Earth, say, Japanese and Swahili. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different—their sounds, their grammar, their scripts. Yet for centuries, thinkers have been captivated by a tantalizing idea: beneath this staggering diversity, there must be a common blueprint, a set of rules or features shared by every single human language. This is the hunt for language universals, the holy grail of linguistics.
The quest isn’t just academic navel-gazing. If true universals exist, they could tell us something profound about the human mind itself. They might be the linguistic fossil record of an innate, biological “language organ” that all humans are born with. But as we’ve learned more about the world’s 7,000+ languages, the list of candidates for absolute, no-exceptions-allowed universals has grown surprisingly, and controversially, short.
The Lure of a Universal Grammar
The modern search for universals is most famously associated with linguist Noam Chomsky. He proposed the theory of Universal Grammar (UG), suggesting that the human brain comes pre-wired with a foundational set of grammatical principles. This innate knowledge would explain how children can acquire the fantastically complex system of their native language so quickly and with such little direct instruction. They aren’t starting from scratch; they’re just filling in the specific details (like vocabulary and word order) for the language they hear around them.
If UG is real, then we should be able to find its fingerprints all over the world’s languages. These fingerprints are the universals—the non-negotiable features that every language must have because they are part of our shared cognitive toolkit. For decades, linguists proposed a number of “obvious” candidates.
The problem? The more languages we document, the more exceptions we find.
The Usual Suspects: Where the Cracks Begin to Show
Let’s examine some of the most famous proposed universals and the fascinating languages that have challenged them.
Universal #1: All languages have nouns and verbs.
This seems like a safe bet. You need words for things (nouns) and words for actions or states (verbs), right? How could you even form a basic sentence otherwise? Most languages, from English to Mandarin, clearly distinguish these categories.
The Exception: Enter languages like Straits Salish (spoken by Indigenous peoples in British Columbia and Washington). Some linguists argue that in these languages, there isn’t a hard-wired distinction. A single word, like t’ílem, can mean “sing” (a verb-like idea) or “a song” (a noun-like idea) depending on its position in the sentence, without changing its form. The argument is that these languages don’t have separate classes of “noun” and “verb” but a single class of “content words” that can be used flexibly. While this interpretation is still debated, it throws a wrench into what seems like the most basic universal of all.
Universal #2: All languages have vowels.
Every language needs vowels to create syllables and make speech flow. Consonants are the stops and starts, but vowels are the substance. It’s hard to imagine a spoken language without sounds like /a/, /i/, or /u/.
The (Near) Exception: This universal is one of the strongest contenders. However, some languages push the definition to its limit. The Nuxalk language of British Columbia is famous for its complex consonant clusters and long words that, at least on the surface, seem to have no vowels at all. For example, the word clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]), meaning “he had had a bunchberry plant in his possession”, contains a long string of consonants. While linguists argue that some of these consonants function as syllables (syllabic consonants), Nuxalk demonstrates that a language can get by with a minimal, almost non-existent vowel inventory, challenging our assumptions about what a “typical” sound system looks like.
Universal #3: All languages use recursion.
Recursion is the ability to embed a structure inside a similar structure. It’s what allows us to create infinitely long and complex sentences. Think of: “This is the house that Jack built.” We embedded a clause inside another. We can do it again: “This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.” Chomsky famously argued that recursion is the defining feature of human language, the one thing that separates it from all other animal communication systems.
The Exception: The Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon. Linguist Daniel Everett, who lived with the Pirahã people for years, made the explosive claim that their language shows no evidence of recursion. Pirahã speakers don’t use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, “I want you to leave”, they would express it as two separate ideas: “I want. You leave.” This claim is one of the most heated debates in modern linguistics. If Everett is right, it strikes a major blow to the idea that recursion is a cognitive necessity for language.
So, Are There Any Absolute Universals Left?
As the list of grammatical universals shrinks, linguists have started looking at things from a different angle. Perhaps the universals aren’t specific features like “verbs” or “recursion”, but more abstract design principles.
These might be better candidates:
- Duality of Patterning: Every language has two levels. A small, finite set of meaningless sounds (phonemes) are combined to create a vast, potentially infinite set of meaningful units (words). The sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/ are meaningless on their own, but combine them as “cat” and you have meaning. This principle seems to be true for all known languages.
- Displacement: Every language allows its speakers to talk about things that are not right here, right now. We can discuss the past, the future, or what’s happening on the other side of the world. This ability to communicate about things remote in time and space is a cornerstone of human communication.
- Arbitrariness: The relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The word “dog” doesn’t look, sound, or feel like a dog. This is why different languages can have completely different words for the same object.
These functional principles seem more robust than specific grammatical rules. They describe what a language does rather than precisely how it does it. They allow for the wild diversity we see in grammar and syntax while still capturing what makes human language a unique system.
A Tapestry of Unity and Diversity
The hunt for language universals is far from over. A previously undocumented language could be discovered tomorrow and upend our most cherished theories. What is clear is that the easy answers have been proven wrong.
The lack of absolute universals isn’t a failure for linguistics. On the contrary, it makes the field more exciting. It shows that the human mind is even more flexible and creative than we imagined. The true universal may not be a specific rule like “all languages have adjectives”, but rather the profound, shared human instinct to communicate, to build intricate systems of meaning from sound, gesture, and sign. Every language is a unique solution to the shared human problem of connection, a testament not to a rigid blueprint, but to limitless ingenuity.