Many people speak of languages as easy or difficult, meaning that it is easy or difficult to learn these languages. People do not usually talk about their mother tongues as being easy or difficult for them as native speakers to use. Swedish schoolchildren may say that English is much easier than German because English does not have as much grammar (see also Myth 10: Some Languages Have No Grammar). Immigrants can be heard saying that English, Swedish, German or some other language is quite difficult. Linguists prefer not to comment on such matters globally. There is, they would say, no single scale from easy to difficult, and degree of difficulty can be discussed on many levels.
The difficulty of learning a language as a foreign language refers to some kind of relative difficulty: how hard is it to get there from here? The real question posed here, though, is whether some languages are simpler than others in some absolute sense, in terms of their own systems rather than in terms of some external perspective. It is quite obvious that it is easier for a Swede to learn Norwegian than Polish. For a Czech it is easier to learn Polish than Norwegian. Swedish and Norwegian are similar because they are closely related linguistically and also because they have existed in close cultural contact for several centuries. Correspondingly, the Slavic languages Czech and Polish are close to each other, as are the Bantu languages Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa and the Dravidian languages Tamil and Telegu in southern India. This means that if you have English as your mother tongue, it is easier to learn Germanic languages like Dutch and German than it would be to learn Slavic languages like Polish and Russian or Turkic languages like Kazakh and Tatar. The major reason for this is that the vocabularies have so many similarities in both form and content in the related languages.
Let us look at the components of our linguistic knowledge, and let us assume that our knowledge of a language consists of the following three parts: grammar, vocabulary and rules of usage. This means that if you have English as your first language, you have an English grammar in your head. This grammar makes your pronunciation and your word order similar to that of other English speakers. You also have an English vocabulary at your disposal. We don’t always find the right word when we speak, but very often we do (compare how hard it can be to find the right word when speaking a foreign language). You also have a number of rules of usage at your disposal. These rules tell you when to speak and when to keep quiet, how to address a person, how to ask questions and how to conduct a telephone conversation.
The difficult thing about learning a language is the vocabulary, whether learning one’s native language or learning a foreign language. I make this claim even though I realize that millions of foreign-language learners have cursed the three genders and four cases of German grammar and the inflection of the French auxiliaries. Still, vocabulary takes longer to learn than either of the other facets mentioned. Each individual word is not difficult to learn, but when it is a matter of thousands of words, it does take a lot of time. We learn the grammar of our native language before we start school, but we work on our vocabulary as long as we live. Vocabulary is, then, the most difficult part and that which takes the longest time to learn. In the absolute sense, a language with few words should be easier to learn than one with many, but we cannot look at it that way. We need words to express our thoughts, and with fewer words some thoughts will be harder to express. Nobody learns all the words in a language, not even in his or her native language. Nor can anyone specify exactly how many words there are in a language; it is even difficult to define exactly what a word is. But to put things into perspective, we can say that modern dictionaries for English, German and other languages contain approximately 100,000 words.
The term ‘rules of usage’ refers to a number of things, for example rules for how and when one should speak and rules for who gets the floor in various social situations. The principle is probably that increased cultural proximity leads to increasingly similar rules of usage. Let’s look at an example of this line of thought. For example, the vocabulary of Dutch is much easier for an English speaker than that of Irish or Welsh: so many Dutch words closely resemble English ones because these languages are so closely related. On the other hand the rules of usage are probably equally simple (or hard) in Dutch and Irish, and this is due to the cultural similarities of the Western European countries.
In the absolute sense, a language without complicated rules for politeness and indirect styles of expression should be easier to learn. Let’s look at an example. A British lecturer says, ‘Are you sure the baby will be all right in here?’ to a Swedish student who has brought her baby along to a lecture. The student replies ‘Sure, no problem,’ but the lecturer probably intended the question as a request for the student to leave the room with the baby. This sort of misunderstanding is not uncommon when people from different cultures communicate and can be explained by different rules of usage. An easy language ought to be one with few rules for indirectness and a simple system for expressing politeness. In most of Europe, there are pronouns of power and solidarity (du-Sie in German, tu-vous in French and ty-vy in Russian). Nowadays, neither English nor Swedish makes use of this distinction. Thus, when it comes to form of address, English is simpler than either German or French. On the other hand, there might be other ways to signal social distance which are more subtle and, therefore, just as hard to learn, for example, choosing between Johnnie, John, Smith, Mr Smith and so on. It is difficult to say if there really are languages that are easier than others with respect to rules of usage. Natural languages are not only used to transfer information from one individual to another but also to indicate and to preserve social distinctions. And there are social distinctions in all societies. However, a language like Esperanto, which was constructed specifically to simplify communication between language groups, is in all likelihood easier than others in this particular respect.
For a language learner, the writing system and the orthography (rules for spelling) are major obstacles. Europeans have to spend a lot of time learning how to use the Arabic, Chinese or Japanese writing systems. These difficulties are not considered here, and the main argument for this is that the writing system and the spelling can be considered as external to the language. It is, in principle, possible to switch from one writing system to another without changing anything in the language structure. Turkish, for example, was written in the Arabic script before 1928. Since then it has been written in the Latin alphabet. This, of course, makes it much easier for anyone accustomed to the Latin alphabet. As far as spelling is concerned, an orthography following the principle that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters is simpler than one not meeting this condition. European languages with a written language history going back a thousand years or more have more complicated orthographies than languages which have only recently been reduced to writing. In making a new orthography, one would not invent mute letters, for example.
If we are looking for an absolute measure of linguistic simplicity, we should find it in the field of grammar. We can begin by considering the sound systems of languages. It must surely be the case that the fewer vowels, the fewer consonants and the simpler syllabic structure a language has, the simpler the sound system is. Hawaiian has thirteen distinctive sounds (‘phonemes’ in linguistic terminology), of which eight are consonants and five are vowels. Since the language also has strict rules about the syllable structure (almost all syllables have to consist of one consonant and one vowel in that order), the total number of possible syllables in the language is only 162. Compare English, where consonants can be grouped together both before and after the vowel as in screams and splints. Of all the languages of the world, Hawaiian has one of the simplest sound systems. At the other end of the scale we find the Khoisan languages (previously known as Bushman and Hottentot languages). According to a recently published description, !Xóõ (that is actually how it is spelt), a language spoken in Southern Botswana, has 156 phonemes, of which 78 are rather unusual sounds called clicks, 50 are ordinary consonants and 28 are vowels. Studies of other languages in the area have also arrived at phoneme counts of around 150. The sound systems of these languages are extremely complex. We can rest assured that the pronunciation of Hawaiian would be easier to learn than that of the Khoisan languages. We can also sum up by saying that it actually seems to make sense to place the languages of the world along a scale from simple sound systems to difficult. English takes a place near the middle of such a scale, where most of the languages of the world also crowd. Hence, most languages are equally difficult as far as the sound system is concerned, but there are some examples of considerably simpler and more difficult languages at this level.
There are classifications of the languages of the world according to how they deal with inflection and derivation, that is, patterns for constructing words by the addition of word elements (‘morphemes’ in linguistic terminology). A word such as teachers can be divided into the following morphemes teach-er-s, where -er is a derivational morpheme and -s an inflectional morpheme. We speak of analytic languages with little or no inflection and derivation and synthetic languages with a large degree of inflection and derivation. We can say that English is more analytic than Swedish and that Swedish is more analytic than German, but none of these languages are among the extreme cases. Vietnamese is extremely analytic and Greenlandic is extremely synthetic, just to mention two examples. In absolute terms one could say that analytic languages are easier than synthetic languages, and there are two arguments for this claim. Firstly, children always learn a more analytic version of their native language first; inflectional and derivational suffixes are learned later on. Secondly, pidgin languages from around the world are typically analytic. By pidgin languages we mean contact languages that arise or develop spontaneously. Most pidgin languages are found in the old European colonies around the world. One such language is Fanagalo, which has been used as a contact language between whites, blacks and coloureds in southern Africa since the nineteenth century, not least in the mining industry and in domestic services. Here are some examples from an introduction to the language. What we are interested in here is the grammatical structure of the sentences, not what they reveal about the social situation in pre-independent South Africa.
You know the golf?
‘Have you caddied before?’
Mina hayifuna lo mampara mfan
I not-want the useless boy
‘I don’t want a useless boy.’
Yebo nkos, mina festklas kedi
Yes Sir, I first-class caddie
‘Yes, Sir, I’m a first-class caddie.’
Tata mabol, yena doti, susa yena nga lo manzi
Take balls, they dirty, wash them in the water
‘These balls are dirty, clean them in water.’
There are several things making this language much simpler than any of the languages from which it has been formed. Mina means both I and me, yena both they and them. To express possession, ga- is placed before the word: gamina ‘mine’ and gayena ‘their’. The plural is always formed by placing ma- in front of the word: hoi, ‘ball’ and mabol, ‘balls’. It is simpler to have one plural ending instead of several, as English does. The definite article is invariably lo, which is easier than having a number of different articles as in German, where there are three genders with different articles (der, die and das) or French, with two genders (le and la). The list of simple and general rules of the language could be made much longer. The world’s most famous pidgin language speaker is Tarzan. When he says ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane,’ he uses a simplified version of English. Since Tarzan has been translated and published in several languages, we could travel around the globe buying Tarzan magazines and in that way get an impression of what people regard as simplified versions of their respective languages. A safe guess is that Tarzan speaks a more analytic version of the language than his readership and in each case Tarzan is likely to have fewer forms in his morphology than the readership.
One could, of course, object that pidgin languages are not real languages because nobody has them as a mother tongue. On the other hand, pidgin languages sometimes become the mother tongue of a group of people. They are then called Creole languages. During the process of creolization, different complications in the grammar (as well as in the lexicon) will arise, but for a number of generations these Creole languages will remain relatively simple. There is then good reason to believe that analytic languages are easier than synthetic. A more general conclusion could be that it is actually possible to speak of easier and harder languages with regard to grammar.
Once we look away from pidgins and Creoles, which may be thought of as developing languages, we find another problem, with talking about simplicity. Languages are not uniformly simple or difficult. We might think that Finnish is simpler than English because it has no articles (words corresponding to a and the); on the other hand, we might think it is more difficult than English because it has an elaborate system of inflections on nouns. Simplicity in one part of the language may be balanced by complexity in another part.
In fact, matters are less straightforward than even this suggests, because it is not necessarily the case that we can judge in any sensible way what is or is not simple. For example, some languages – Maori is one – allow only one adjective to modify a noun at a time. So, to translate the English I saw a fat black cat, you would have to say the equivalent of something like I saw a fat cat. It was black. Is the English system simpler because it uses fewer words? Or is the other system simpler because it has a less complex structure of modification? It is not clear that such questions can be meaningfully answered, and so not clear that we can give overall measurements of simplicity in syntax.
Considering what has been said above, the myth that some languages are harder than others is not merely a myth. In a fairly complicated way, and in certain respects, some languages are harder than others. Furthermore, there is no single scale for measuring simplicity in language; there are, at least, a handful of such scales. The real problems emerge when we try to figure out the possible trading relationships between the different scales. For example: does simplification on one scale lead to complication on another? Summing up: Some languages appear to be harder than others, but it is hard to explain exactly how and to what extent.
Many of the facts about the languages of the world have been taken from David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The Fanagalo sentences are taken from J. D. Bold’s Fanagalo: Phrase-Book, grammar and dictionary (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 15th edn, 1990). This book is referred to in L.-G. Andersson and T. Janson’s Languages in Botswana (Gaborone: Longman, Botswana, 1997), from which most of the facts about African languages are taken. The technical terms used, such as ‘phoneme’, ‘morpheme’, ‘orthography’, ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’, can be found in most introductory books about linguistics.