2 Things That Make English Weird

Is English “weird”? Many of us might feel this is true when we’re trying to explain the complex spelling rules of the language, or the meanings of idioms such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” to someone who is learning English. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task.

But what is a “weird” language anyway? As linguists, we generally aim to be as objective as possible in the study of human language. We view ourselves as language scientists who make hypotheses about how humans use language and test them against linguistic data. Unlike so-called “language police”, we believe it is important to avoid where possible making value judgements about language.

Some computational linguists have used data in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) to explore (tongue firmly in cheek) which languages might be considered the “weirdest”. This was not just a value judgement: they systematically compared the information in the WALS website for 239 languages from different parts of the world.

Their aim was to find out which languages had the largest number of features that differed most from other languages. In this survey, English came in 33rd position out of 239 languages. So it definitely has more atypical features than over 80% of the other languages in the survey.

Critics have however claimed the survey was too biased as it used only a few features of the world’s many languages. Indeed, there are aspects of English that are not unusual compared to many other languages, such as its dominant subject-verb-object word order. But let’s look here at two features of English that might in fact be unusual.

English sounds strange

English probably sounds a little strange to many speakers of other languages. According to the WALS, the average number of distinctive speech sounds in the world’s languages is about 25-30 – known as “phonemes”. Pirahã, an indigenous language spoken in the Amazon region of Brazil, has an unusually small set of phonemes. It has eight...

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