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For years, many linguists—myself included—have been eagerly awaiting the publication of what we call "the wals," and last year the great day finally came when we could hold in our hands—or, given its heft, more likely on our laps—what non-linguists will see as a big, pretty book of unclear utility called The World Atlas of Language Structures.
The World Atlas of Language Structures
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The layman will page through the wals and find 142 world maps festooned with multicolored dots standing for languages. Each map addresses a particular aspect of grammar, prefaced by an essay on the variations on that feature that the world's 6,000-plus languages display. For example, many of us have wrestled with the annoying genders in European languages, such as French's masculine le bateau ("the boat") and feminine la maison ("the house"). There are, in fact, many languages with multiple genders to learn (Swahili features six main ones), while just as many other languages have no gender at all (the language I am writing in is one example). The "Number of Genders" map, surveying 256 languages across the globe, shows that languages with way too many genders are concentrated in Africa, while languages with none are most common in Southeast Asia and in the Americas.
The layman is to be pardoned for wondering just why one might care about such matters. To begin with, this massive project reminds us that many human languages are counterintuitively different from English, Spanish, French, or German—the languages we learn most often, and which we are disposed to regard as normative—and different as well from ones farther afield (Arabic and Chinese, for instance).
Take the "Order of Subject, Object and Verb" map: it shows that the word order we Anglophones feel as "normal," the subject-verb-object sequence of The boy fed the dog, is less common worldwide than subject-object-verb, such that in Japanese it would be The boy the dog fed. And then a handful of languages put things exactly in the reverse of English: in the South American language Hixkaryana, spoken by a few hundred people in the jungles of Brazil, The jaguar grabbed the man is rendered as "The man grabbed the jaguar." Just why most of the few languages with this order are spoken by small groups in South America is as yet unknown, but there it is.
Still, what I have described so far may leave with you the impression of a coffee-table book, full of neat but inconsequential factoids. Is The World Atlas of Language Structures a linguist's version of one of those bulky art books or the National Geographic World Atlas, lovely on the end table but almost never opened?
In fact, no. For example, many of these maps have crucial implications for the ideas of none other than Noam Chomsky. I refer not to his political activism but to his day job in linguistics. Forty years ago Chomsky founded a still thriving school of linguists hoping to find imprinted in our brains a "Universal Grammar." The idea is that we are born with a neurological endowment for speaking and processing language, much of it consisting of "switches" that can be set "on" or "off." Which are "on" and which are "off" presumably makes the difference between, say, Navajo and French or Japanese and Hebrew. So, some languages use a subject pronoun with a verb (he talks), while others can drop the pronoun, like Spanish habla for he talks, where the pronoun él is optional and usually absent. Another switch would make the difference between The jaguar grabbed the man and Hixkaryana's The man grabbed the jaguar.
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