Uncovering the world’s linguistic diversity Do languages change systematically in certain environments? We spoke to Professor Kaius Sinnemäki, Dr. Francesca Di Garbo, Dr. Eri Kashima and Dr. Ricardo Napoleão de Souza about the work of the GramAdapt project in combining typological and sociolinguistic methods to investigate linguistic adaptation. Around 7,000 different
languages are currently spoken across the world, some of which are the mother tongue of millions of people in large countries, while others are spoken by relatively small populations in remote areas. Based at the University of Helsinki, Professor Kaius Sinnemäki is the Principal Investigator of the GramAdapt project, an ERC-backed initiative which aims to help build a deeper picture of this linguistic diversity. “Our work comes under the umbrella of language typology, the worldwide comparison of languages,” he outlines. “We aim to cover languages from many different language families. So this means not just those from the Indo-European family for instance, but also languages from the Uralic, Austronesian, Austroasiatic, and other families.”
GramAdapt project at the crossroads between typology and sociolinguistics A combination of typological and sociolinguistic approaches are being applied in the project to explore the structure of language,
with Professor Sinnemäki and his colleagues aiming to look at a group of 150 languages. The typology strand of this research involves mapping the strategies that are used in different languages to achieve certain functions or meanings. “For example, in English morphemes can be used to change a verb into a noun, like adding -ion to the verb ‘invent’ to change it to the noun ‘invention’,” explains Dr. Francesca Di Garbo. In other languages this change may be achieved using other means. “Typologists explore this variation of strategies and present it through geographic patterns, for instance,” continues Dr. Di Garbo. The strategies found in languages are often the result of inheritance, so sister languages tend to have similar structures. Very different structures are evident in other languages however, with researchers in the project aiming to draw comparisons. “Most of the work typologists do is about comparing the structure of languages, like how words are built up from smaller parts, how the sound system is structured, and what is the word order,” says Professor Sinnemäki. In English,
the word order subject-verb-object is used in a simple sentence, but a different order is used in Turkish and Hindi for example. “They put the verb at the end of the sentence. So instead of ‘John likes Mary’, they would say ‘John Mary likes’,” he outlines. “This may have significant repercussions elsewhere in the grammar.” This typological work is combined with socio-linguistic research in the project, in which the focus is on the relationship between languages and the groups of people that speak them, including languages spoken by relatively small numbers of people. During her PhD studies, Dr. Eri Kashima did field work in a remote part of Papua New Guinea, where she studied a local language. “I was hosted by a local tribe, and they identified their language as Nmbo. It’s probably spoken by about 700 people, while other people in the area have learnt it as a second language,” she says. By analysing different parts of the language and its use by male and female, young and old, Dr. Kashima was able to identify the core structure of the language and important aspects of its social variation.
50 sets of languages chosen from 24 geographic-cultural areas Observational Units: Language Sets
“The local community really got involved and were very enthusiastic,” she continues. The descriptions of these types of languages are central to the wider goal of uncovering as much of the world’s linguistic diversity as possible. The aim in the project is to build a sample of 150 languages that is as representative as possible of global diversity. “In principle, we want to look at languages from all areas of the world,” says Dr. Di Garbo. This diversity will help ensure the project’s findings are robust, and not slanted towards one specific geographic region. “We know that most European languages work very similarly in many respects,” points out Dr. Ricardo Napoleão de Souza. “There are also geographical influences, as languages that are spoken in neighbouring areas for very long periods tend to become more similar over time because of multilingualism and mutual borrowing.”
Language structures and sociolinguistic environments The data on these different languages provides the basis for researchers to investigate the structure of language, and whether it adapts to the socio-linguistic context in which it is spoken. Most of the languages being analysed are spoken by relatively small groups of people, and Professor Sinnemäki hopes the project’s work will help bring these languages to the fore. “We want to look at languages spoken by minorities more systematically. Most languages in human history have been spoken by small people groups, but we do not have a clear idea what happens in them,” he says. A questionnaire is being developed in the project to help researchers characterise how language is used in different social domains. “It is structured in a way aimed not only at a modern, western society, but it also aims to capture how language is used in
We are investigating topics like how language is used and how it changes when it’s being spoken by smaller groups of people, when it’s being spoken by larger groups, or in environments where there is a lot of multilingualism. A large number of words commonly used in modern English have their roots in other languages, for example entrepreneur and schadenfreude, while there are also other reasons why a language may have certain similarities with another. One is that these languages are related, so they have inherited features from a shared ancestor, like in biology, while there are also other factors to consider. “Different languages may also change in the same ways because humans process and learn languages largely in the same ways all over the world. So although they are not related, and not spoken in the same areas, they may still look alike in various ways,” explains Professor Sinnemäki. “There’s also simple chance. There are some similarities in the structure of words between Finnish and the Quechuan languages spoken in the Peruvian Andes, but that’s just by chance.”
smaller communities, in principle anywhere in the world,” outlines Dr. Di Garbo. This is part of the wider goal of bringing the psychological and sociological aspects of linguistic research together. The aim here is to investigate whether languages change systematically in certain environments. “This means things like how language is used and how it changes when it’s being spoken by smaller groups of people, when it’s being spoken by larger groups, or in environments where there is a lot of multilingualism,” says Professor Sinnemäki. This research is grounded in empirical data on different languages from across the world, and Professor Sinnemäki believes their work also holds relevance beyond linguistics. “We want our research to be visible beyond the linguistics field, to anthropologists, social psychologists and cognitive scientists for instance,” he says.
GramAdapt Linguistic Adaptation: Typological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives to Language Variation Project Objectives
The ERC Starting Grant project GramAdapt aims at developing a synthesis of crosslinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation: this novel framework enables transforming sociolinguistic data to a typology of speech communities and for researching whether language structures adapt to the social environment in which they are and have been spoken.
Project Funding
European Research Council ERC Starting Grant project “Linguistic Adaptation”
Project Partners
• Dr. Francesca Di Garbo • Dr. Eri Kashima • Dr. Ricardo Napoleão de Souza
Contact Details
Principal Investigator, Kaius Sinnemäki Assoc. Prof. of Quantitative and Comparative Linguistics Area Editor, Linguistics Vanguard Department of Languages University of Helsinki T: +35 8 50 4482065 E: kaius.sinnemaki@helsinki.fi W: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/ researchgroups/linguistic-adaptation W: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/ persons/kaius-sinnemäki Dr Kaius Sinnemäki, Dr Francesca Di Garbo, Dr Eri Kashima, Dr Ricardo Napoleão de Souza (from left to right) Photographs by Mika Federley
Dr Kaius Sinnemäki is Associate Professor of Quantitative and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. He conducts research on language variation and universals and develops new tools for comparing how linguistic patterns interact among themselves and with social patterns across languages. In 2020 he was selected to the Young Academy of Europe.
Variables: Linguistic and Socio-Cultural
Map created by Sakari Sarjakoski.
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The village of Bevdvn in the Morehead District of Western Province, Papua New Guinea (taken by Eri Kashima in 2015).
EU Research
Linguistic Variables
Example
Word and meaning (Lexico-semantic)
Kinship terms
Speech sounds (Phonological)
Syllable structure
Word formation and grammar (Morpho-syntactic)
Grammatical number, and other inflection
Data source: Published material
Reference grammars, others.
Socio-cultural Variables
Example
Language Ecology (Macrostructural and language ecological)
Societal multilingualism, language ideologies
Network structures (Network structures and linguistic diffusion)
Social network density
Interaction (Socio-cognitive)
Audience design, shared norms
Cognitive processing (General cognition and language processing)
Bi- and multilingualism
Data source: Questionnaire
Questionnaire designed for the project
www.euresearcher.com
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