Grambank shows the diversity of the world’s languages

An international team has created a new database that documents patterns of grammatical variation in over 2400 of the world's languages. Grammatical similarity in the Grambank sample of languages. The color coding represents the distribution of languages according to the first three principal components of a Principal Component Analysis mapped onto RGB color space (PC1 = Red, PC2 = Green and PC3 = Blue). Similarity in color indicates similarity in grammatical structure on the first three dimensions. MPI f. Evolutionary Anthropology - What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages. The project was initiated by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in collaboration with a team of over a hundred linguists from around the world.