Guest lecturer Jeff Parker addressed why we typically think some languages are harder than others.
PROVO, Utah (January 22, 2015) —What is it about learning Chinese or Arabic that seems intrinsically more daunting than French or Spanish? According to Jeff Parker from The Ohio State University, our stereotyped expectations about what makes a language “hard” are oftentimes incomplete because a language’s complexity is, well, complex.
Parker presented a lecture for the Department of German and Russian on his research on the complexity of languages. Parker’s research delves into the many facets of language structure that create reputations for a language being “easy” or “hard.” Which aspects of language perpetuate these reputations of complexity or simplicity, and what do they mean? What does it mean for a language to be complex or more complex than another? How do we measure that? “Particularly interesting for me and my research [are the questions] ‘what does this grammatical complexity do for how we process language’ and ‘what do we know about how we make generalizations about language data,’” he said.
There are many elements making up language complexity. “We can talk about sentence structure, word structure, sound structure and all these different things,” said Parker, “but what is really difficult is how we put these together to get some sort of idea of what a language is.”
Parker explained that any given language contains both complex and simple elements. For example, in Russian there is free word order, unlike in English. This means that where a word is placed in a sentence doesn’t necessary change the meaning of the sentence. In English, however, most sentences have a more complex word order, and altering the word order changes the sentence meaning. Even though the rules for sentence structure are more simple in Russian, the actual structure of individual words is more complicated than in English. Russian words change according to gender, tense, plurality and case, and English word structure is much more simple. When talking about which language is “more difficult,” Parker asked, “How do we equate those?”
These kinds of differences in language complexity make it difficult to generalize which languages are hard or easy to learn. However, Parker investigated word structure as one type of complexity that can be used to compare the difficulty of various languages. According to Parker, the complexity of word structure is often what we refer to implicitly in the casual things we say Russian being more difficult than another.
When it comes to making accurate assertions on which languages are hard and which are not, Parker said, it’s best to study different domains of the language (such as sentence structure, word structure and sound structure) in order to get a more well-rounded perspective on languages in relation to one another.
—Danielle Chelom Leavitt (B.A. Russian / Women Studies ’15)