Language complexity


Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity.
The subject also carries importance for language evolution.
Language complexity has been studied less than many other traditional fields of linguistics. While the consensus is turning towards recognizing that complexity is a suitable research area, a central focus has been on methodological choices. Some languages, particularly pidgins and creoles, are considered simpler than most other languages, but there is no direct ranking, and no universal method of measurement although several possibilities are now proposed within different schools of analysis.

History

Throughout the 19th century, differential complexity was taken for granted. The classical languages Latin and Greek, as well as Sanskrit, were considered to possess qualities which could be achieved by the rising European national languages only through an elaboration that would give them the necessary structural and lexical complexity that would meet the requirements of an advanced civilization. At the same time, languages described as 'primitive' were naturally considered to reflect the simplicity of their speakers. On the other hand, Friedrich Schlegel noted that some nations "which appear to be at the very lowest grade of intellectual culture", such as Basque, Sámi and some native American languages, possess a striking degree of elaborateness.
Darwin considered the apparent complexity of many non-Western languages as problematic for evolution theory which in his time held that less advanced people should have less complex languages. Darwin's suggestion was that simplicity and irregularities were the result of extensive language contact while "the extremely complex and regular construction of many barbarous languages" should be seen as an utmost perfection of the one and same evolutionary process.

Equal complexity hypothesis

During the 20th century, linguists and anthropologists adopted a standpoint that would reject any nationalist ideas about superiority of the languages of establishment. The first known quote that puts forward the idea that all languages are equally complex comes from Rulon S. Wells III, 1954, who attributes it to Charles F. Hockett. Within a year, the same idea found its way to Encyclopædia Britannica:
While laymen never ceased to consider certain languages as simple and others as complex, such a view was erased from official contexts. For instance, the 1971 edition of Guinness Book of World Records featured Saramaccan, a creole language, as "the world's least complex language". According to linguists, this claim was "not founded on any serious evidence", and it was removed from later editions. Apparent complexity differences in certain areas were explained with a balancing force by which the simplicity in one area would be compensated with the complexity of another; e.g. David Crystal, 1987:
In 2001 the compensation hypothesis was eventually refuted by the creolist John McWhorter who pointed out the absurdity of the idea that, as languages change, each would have to include a mechanism that calibrates it according to the complexity of all the other 6,000 or so languages around the world. He underscored that linguistics has no knowledge of any such mechanism.
Revisiting the idea of differential complexity, McWhorter argued that it is indeed creole languages, such as Saramaccan, that are structurally "much simpler than all but very few older languages". In McWhorter's notion this is not problematic in terms of the equality of creole languages because simpler structures convey logical meanings in the most straightforward manner, while increased language complexity is largely a question of features which may not add much to the functionality, or improve usefulness, of the language. Examples of such features are inalienable possessive marking, switch-reference marking, syntactic asymmetries between matrix and subordinate clauses, grammatical gender, and other secondary features which are most typically absent in creoles.
During the years following McWhorter's article, several books and dozens of articles were published on the topic. As to date, there have been research projects on language complexity, and several workshops for researchers have been organised by various universities.

Complexity metrics

At a general level, language complexity can be characterized as the number and variety of elements, and the elaborateness of their interrelational structure. This general characterisation can be broken down into sub-areas:
Measuring complexity is considered difficult, and the comparison of whole natural languages as a daunting task. On a more detailed level, it is possible to demonstrate that some structures are more complex than others. Phonology and morphology are areas where such comparisons have traditionally been made. For instance, linguistics has tools for the assessment of the phonological system of any given language. As for the study of syntactic complexity, grammatical rules have been proposed as a basis, but generative frameworks, such as Minimalist Program and Simpler Syntax, have been less successful in defining complexity and its predictions than non-formal ways of description.
Many researchers suggest that several different concepts may be needed when approaching complexity: entropy, size, description length, effective complexity, information, connectivity, irreducibility, low probability, syntactic depth etc. Research suggests that while methodological choices affect the results, even rather crude analytic tools may provide a feasible starting point for measuring grammatical complexity.

A comparison

Guy illustrates the point by comparing two Santo languages he has worked on that are about as closely related as French and Spanish, Tolomako and Sakao, both spoken in the village of Port Olry, Vanuatu. Because these languages are very similar to each other, and equally distant from English, he holds that neither is inherently biased as being seen as more easy or difficult by an English speaker.

Phonology

Sakao has more, and more difficult, vowel distinctions than Tolomako:
In addition, it has more and more difficult consonant distinctions:

Tolomako has a simple syllable structure, maximally consonant–vowel–vowel. It is not clear if Sakao even has syllables; that is, whether trying to divide Sakao words into meaningful syllables is even possible.

Morphology

With inalienably possessed nouns, Tolomako inflections are consistently regular, whereas Sakao is full of irregular nouns:

Here Tolomako "mouth" is invariably ' and "hair" invariably , whereas Sakao "mouth" is variably ' and "hair" variably .

Syntax

With deixis, Tolomako has three degrees, whereas Sakao has seven.
Tolomako has a preposition to distinguish the object of a verb from an instrument; indeed, a single preposition, ne, is used for all relationships of space and time. Sakao, on the other hand, treats both as objects of the verb, with a transitive suffix ' that shows the verb has two objects, but letting context disambiguate which is which:
The Sakao strategy involves polysynthetic syntax, as opposed to the isolating syntax of Tolomako:
Here ' "the bow" is the instrumental of ' "to shoot", and ' "the sea" is the direct object of ' "to follow", which because they are combined into a single verb, are marked as ditransitive with the suffix . Because ' "to shoot" has the incorporated object ' "fish", the first consonant geminates for '; , being part of one word, then reduces to . And indeed, the previous example of killing a pig could be put more succinctly, but grammatically more complexly, in Sakao by incorporating the object 'pig' into the verb:
Guy asks rhetorically, "Which of the two languages spoken in Port-Olry do you think the Catholic missionaries learnt and used? Could that possibly be because it was easier than the other?"

Language complexity and learning

A common conventional wisdom is that some languages are inherently harder to learn than others as first or second languages, due to their greater complexity. However this belief is as of yet not supported by sufficient scientific evidence.
The perceived difficulty of second language acquisition seems to largely depend on the similarity between the learner's native language and the language they are learning. In a study conducted in 2013, scientists used FSI’s data to try to identify the criteria that have an influence on the difficulty of foreign language learning.
  • First, a language that is genetically related to the learner's native language will be easier to learn than a language from a different family. This is mostly due to language structure. The closer a language is to another, the more similar their structures will be.
  • Another criterion is the writing system. Learners will be quicker to learn a language which uses the same writing system as their own native language.
Therefore, the most complicated language to learn for an English native speaker would be for example a non-Indo European ergative language with a different writing system and with postpositions instead of prepositions.
Another study conducted in 2006, started with the common idea that Arabic is hard to learn for an English native speaker, more so than Spanish or German. This study is also based on the FSI classification of languages according to their difficulty, placing Arabic in the fourth group. The study compares Arabic with languages usually perceived as easier to learn and concludes that Arabic is not inherently more complex than these languages. The study provides a list of linguistic properties that make Arabic actually simpler than these languages. For instance, despite the complexity of Arabic consonant roots, the Arabic verbal system relies on very specific sub-rules and uses only a single verb paradigm. On the other hand, Spanish is more complex than Arabic in its verbal tenses. French is more complex in its phoneme-grapheme correspondence. German, Polish and Greek have more complex systems of case inflections. Japanese has a more complex writing system. The fact that English native speakers perceive Arabic as particularly difficult to learn would then not be due to Arabic being inherently harder but rather to the fact that its structure and writing system are very different from English.
The belief that some languages are inherently harder to learn is less commonly found for first language learning, although first language acquisition should probably be more strongly correlated with the language's inherent complexity. Some studies have tackled this question. For instance, there is evidence from Danish that children learning a language with a complex sound structure might be slightly delayed in their lexical development. Danish has a complex phonological system, with extensive lenition of plosives. In line with the hypothesis that a more complex phonology entails greater difficulties in word learning, Danish children were found to have a slight delay in early lexical development compared to children speaking other languages. This suggests that sound structure might have an influence on the difficulty of a language. There is, however, not enough evidence as of yet to confidently say that some languages are globally easier or harder to learn as a first language.

Language complexity and creoles

It is generally acknowledged that, as young languages, creoles are necessarily simpler than non-creoles. Guy believes this to be untrue ; after a comparison with Antillean Creole, he writes, "I assure you that it is far, far more complex than Tolomako!", despite being based on his native language, French.

Computational tools

  • Coh-Metrix
  • L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer
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