Typological & diachronic database
Explore how languages share, differ, and change.
Language Patterns documents recurring strategies, pathways, and cycles across the world's languages — from how unrelated languages express “there is” to how negation rebuilds itself over centuries.
How do languages say “there is”?
Languages reach for a small set of recurring strategies to assert that something exists: a copula (BE), a possession verb (HAVE), a dedicated existential predicate (EXIST), or a locative frame (“at the place, X is”). To make the comparison robust, we use three deliberately universal test sentences — inanimate (“there is water in the river”), animate singular (“there is a dog in the house”), and animate plural (“there are people in the village”). Together they expose splits by animacy (Japanese ある↔いる, German es gibt↔sein, Swahili kuna↔yuko), by number (English is↔are, Italian c’è↔ci sono, Latin est↔sunt, Ainu an↔oka), and by case (Finnish partitive on mass / nominative on countable / partitive on existential plural).
How do languages say “I have X”?
Possession looks like one notion, but languages package it in strikingly different ways. Some use a transitive HAVE-verb. Others say something closer to “at me, X is” (locational), “to me, X is” (dative), “I-with X” (comitative), or “as for me, X exists” (topic). The same language often picks a different strategy depending on what is possessed — inanimate, animate, kin, body-parts — so Possession is one of the great showcases of typological diversity.
How do languages say “I don’t have X”?
To express absence of possession, languages either negate a HAVE-verb, add a negative determiner to the object, or reframe the situation as one of non-existence or absence — with the possessor as topic, location, or dative.
How do languages build the paradigm of someone, anyone, no one, and everyone?
Across languages, the words for *someone*, *anyone (under negation)*, *anyone (free choice)*, *no one*, and *everyone* are rarely five unrelated items. Far more often they are built from a small set of recurring ingredients: an interrogative base (*who?*) combined with a tiny suffix or particle — “also/even”, “every”, “some”, “any” — that flips it into one or another quantifier reading. Japanese 誰も, 誰でも, 誰か; Mandarin 誰也, 誰都; Korean 누구도, 누구나, 누군가; Russian кто-то, кто-нибудь, никто all show variants of this “interrogative + small particle” construction. English took a different road and lexicalised the series outright (some-/any-/no-/every-). The grid below is the heart of the pattern: read across a row to see one language’s paradigm, read down a column to see how the same function gets built in radically different ways.
In what order do languages arrange subject, object, and verb?
Of the six logically possible orderings of subject, object, and verb, only two account for most of the world: SOV (subject-object-verb, the largest group — Japanese, Hindi, Korean, Turkish, Quechua, Navajo) and SVO (English, Mandarin, Romance, most Bantu). VSO (verb-initial) is consistent across Celtic, much of Polynesian, Classical Arabic, and Biblical Hebrew. VOS shows up famously in Malagasy. Object-initial orders (OVS, OSV) are vanishingly rare and the textbook examples — Hixkaryana, Nadëb, Warao — are still debated. Many languages have no fixed dominant order at all: word order is set by information structure (Latin, Sanskrit, Hungarian, Russian to a lesser extent) or by extensive scrambling (Warlpiri, Dyirbal).
Do adpositions come before or after the noun phrase?
Languages line up two ways here. Verb-final languages put the adposition after the noun (postpositions): English *on the table* ↔ Japanese *tēburu no ue ni* — “table’s top at.” Verb-initial and SVO languages put it before (prepositions). The correlation is one of the most robust word-order universals in typology (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992) — but there are pointed exceptions. Mande languages (Bambara, Mandinka) are SOV but lean prepositional. Finnish and Hungarian are SVO-leaning but stay postpositional from their Uralic inheritance. A few languages use *inpositions* (the marker goes inside the NP — rare but attested), and a handful — Tagalog, classical Hawaiian — have such a thin adpositional inventory that the question barely applies.
How does negation rebuild itself over time?
A recurrent diachronic pattern: a simple preverbal negator weakens, gets reinforced by an extra element (often a minimizer like “step” or “thing”), the reinforcement is reanalysed as the real negator, the old marker fades, and the new negator may itself start weakening — restarting the cycle.