6 Ways That Every Language Is the Same

More than 7,100 languages are spoken on Earth today, ranging from island tongues with only a few hundred speakers to the global giants Mandarin and English. These languages represent a dazzling array of linguistic constructs, each with its own sounds, grammar, and logic. And among them are languages that might seem almost alien to the average English speaker: languages that use clicks and whistles, those that have no words for describing numbers or colors, and, in the case of the Rotokas language, one with an alphabet of only 12 letters. 

Despite their obvious differences, the languages of our world also share many fascinating similarities. These striking consistencies are known as linguistic universals — patterns that are hypothesized to be true for all human languages. (There is some debate involved as to how absolutely universal certain elements are, but they are, at the very least, prevalent.) Take a look at six things that are the same in almost every language. 

Nearly all documented languages clearly distinguish between things and actions/states — nouns and verbs, respectively — in some form. The categories may include different words, and the line can blur, but the underlying distinction is near-universal. This likely reflects how human cognition is organized: We perceive the world as objects moving through time and doing things to each other. In this way, language can be understood as cognition made audible. 

But some languages do blur the noun-verb boundary. The Salish languages, spoken in the Pacific Northwest, are a notable outlier with no clear distinction between nouns and verbs — for example, the root word for “fish” can mean “to fish,” “the fisher,” “the fishing,” or “there is a fish.” In Samoan, too, the verb-noun relationship is unusually flexible, with the same word appearing in positions that English would reserve strictly for either nouns or verbs. English has a history of turning nouns into verbs (and vice versa), but these examples are very much exceptions — and only to a certain degree — to what can otherwise be considered an almost universal rule. 

Every language has a way to ask a question and, in turn, give an answer. Humans are inherently curious, social creatures, and the ability to request information from others is so fundamental to cooperation that no culture has ever evolved without it — questions and answers are true linguistic universals. Polar questions are those that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” — such as, “Are you hungry?” These straightforward questions are among the most common types in most languages, but some languages don’t have defined, direct equivalents for “yes” and “no.” Irish is one such language, which instead relies on echo responses to answer questions, in which the verb from the question is repeated in the answer to indicate affirmation or negation (Q: Are you hungry? A: I am not). So, while all languages have the ability to ask questions and give answers, they don’t always do so in the same way.  

Spatial reference — known in linguistics as spatial deixis — is the ability to locate things relative to the speaker, and it’s universal to every known language. Languages have at minimum a two-way distinction between proximal (“here” or “near me”) and distal (“there” or “away from me”). But some languages have more elaborate systems. In Spanish, for example, there is a three-way system: aquí (“here,” “near me”), ahí (“there,” “near you”), and allí (“over there,” “far from both”). Other languages are even more complex — some Australian Aboriginal languages, for example, incorporate a fourth or fifth spatial distinction based on elevation and topographical elements (such as uphill/downhill or upstream/downstream). No matter the system in place, the universality of “here” and “there” is only logical — as humans, we are always somewhere, and language has to account for that. 

In many languages across the world, the words for “mother” and “father” are very similar. Mother words are particularly consistent, and the reason is fascinating. They often begin with a nasal sound (“m” or to a lesser degree “n”) — for example, mama in Spanish, maman in French, mamay in Quechua, and maa in Hindi — simply because these are among the very first babbling sounds a human baby can make, requiring almost no coordination of the lips or tongue. And once babies are capable of saying the “ma” sound, they soon learn to say “pa” and “da,” which accounts for the global similarity in words for “father,” such as “daddy” and the Spanish papá. In other words, it was babies who invented the words for “mother” and “father,” and they did it almost everywhere, independently, across the world. 

Every language on Earth uses onomatopoeia — words that imitate the sounds they describe. From the bark of a dog to the hum of an insect, humans instinctively try to recreate the noises of the animal world with their voices. In English, a dog goes “woof” and a bee goes “buzz” — but in Japanese it’s wan-wan for a dog (or au au for a smaller dog) and būn for a bee, in French it’s ouaf-ouaf and bzzz, and in Afrikaans it’s boef and zoem. They all reflect how each language hears and reproduces noises using their own set of speech sounds. While the exact imitation varies from culture to culture, the impulse is universal: Language takes cues from its environment and turns common sounds into words.  

All human languages use similes and metaphors. Both are universal cognitive and linguistic devices, acting as foundational tools that allow speakers to describe new, abstract, or complex concepts by comparing them to known, concrete experiences. And metaphorical thought isn’t just a feature of flowery prose and poetry — it represents how the human mind works and helps us to better understand our world. 

Of course, metaphors, similes, and idioms differ greatly from one language to the next. While in English, for example, you can metaphorically be “caught with your pants down,” the Swedish equivalent is “sitting with your beard in the letter box.” And if someone “has a screw loose” in English, in Portuguese they might have “little monkeys in the attic.” So, while the concept of metaphors is universal, the metaphors themselves are distinct.