A linguistic universal is a statement that is true for all languages. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs. or All spoken languages have consonants and vowels (but not sign languages, to which phonological universals have no relevance). Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to linguistic typology, and intends to reveal information about how the human brain processes language.

The field was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph H. Greenberg, who from a set of some thirty languages derived a set of basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax.

Linguists distinguish between two kinds of universals: absolute and implicational. Absolute universals apply to every known language and are quite few in number; an example would be All languages have pronouns. An implicational universal applies to languages which have a particular feature that is always accompanied by another feature, such as If a language has trial grammatical number, it also must have dual grammatical number.

Also in contrast to absolute universals are tendencies, statements that may not be true for all languages, but nevertheless are far too common to be the result of chance. They also have implicational and non-implicational forms. An example of the latter would be The vast majority of languages have nasal consonants. However, most tendencies, like their universal counterparts, are implicational. For example, With overwhelmingly greater than chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional. Strictly speaking, a tendency is not a kind of universal, but exceptions to most statements called universals can be found. For example, Latin is an SOV language with prepositions. Often it turns out that these exceptional languages are undergoing a shift from one type of language to another. In the case of Latin, its descendant Romance languages switched to SVO, which is a much more common order among prepositional languages.

Linguistic universals are sometimes held up as evidence for universal grammar (though epistemological arguments are more common). Other explanations for linguistic universals have been proposed, for example that linguistic universals tend to be properties of language which aid communication. If a language were to lack one of these properties, it has been argued, it would probably soon evolve into a language having that property.

External link

• Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements by Joseph H. Greenberg
• Penn state University course page on Linguistic universal