Language complexity: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:53, 21 May 2020

Revision as of 17:54, 21 May 2020

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Therefore, the most complicated language to learn for an English native speaker would be for example a non-[[Indo-European languages|Indo European]] [[Ergative-absolutive alignment | ergative language]] with a different writing system and with postpositions.

Another study <ref>{{cite book |last=Stevens |first=Paul B. |editor1-last=Wahba |editor1-first=Kassem M. |editor2-last=Taha |editor2-first=Zeinab A. |editor3-last=England |editor3-first=Liz |title=Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century |publisher=Lawrence Erlbaum Associates |year=2006 |pages=35-66 |chapter=Is Spanish really easy? Is Arabic really so hard? Perceived difficulty in learning arabic as a second language |isbn=978-0-203-76390-2}}</ref> conducted in 2006, started with the commun 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 (relatively difficult) 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 theirArabic consonant roots, the Arabic verbal system relies on very specific sub-rules and uses only a single [[Morphology (linguistics)#Paradigms_and_morphosyntax|verb paradigm]]. Also, Spanish is more complex than Arabic in its verb tenses. French is more complex in its phoneme-grapheme correspondence. German, Polish and Greek have more complex systems of case [[inflection|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 easier to learn is less commonly found for [[language acquisition| 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.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bleses |first1=Dorthe |last2=Vach |first2=Werner |last3=Slott |first3=Malene |last4=Wehberg |first4=Sonja |last5=Thomsen |first5=Pia |last6=Madsen |first6=Thomas O. |last7=Basbøll |first7=Hans |year=2008 |title=Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages: A CDI-based comparison |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-language/article/early-vocabulary-development-in-danish-and-other-languages-a-cdibased-comparison/D12A283664A8BA4A695D0DDF3378555A |journal=Journal of Child Language |volume=35 |issue=3 |pages=619-650 |doi= 10.1017/S0305000908008714 |access-date=2020-05-18}}</ref> Danish has [[Danish phonology|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 (although they seem to catch up when they reach two years of age). 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.