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'All Languages Are Equally Complex'
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Joseph, JE & Newmeyer, FJ 2012, ''All Languages Are Equally Complex': The rise and fall of a consensus'
Historiographia Linguistica, vol 39, no. 2-3, pp. 341-368., 10.1075/hl.39.2-3.08jos
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All Languages Are Equally Complex
The rise and fall of a consensus*
John E. Joseph and Frederick J. Newmeyer

University of Edinburgh / University of Washington
1. Introduction
Both longstanding tradition and popular wisdom hold that languages can vary
from each other in their degree of relative complexity. However, by the late 20th
century a consensus had arisen among linguists that all languages are equally com-
plex. Such an idea may still very well be the majority opinion of the practitioners of
the discipline, though it has come increasingly under challenge. In this paper, we
examine and attempt to explain the rise of the equal complexity idea in the mid-
20th century and its more recent decline in popularity. Section2 illustrates how
the assumption that languages differ in overall complexity was at one time quite
current in the field and is still taken for granted by most nonlinguists. Section3
documents the rise of the equal complexity hypothesis in the latter part of the 20th
century and Section4 discusses the reasons for such a development. Section5 ex-
plains why the hypothesis has recently begun to fall out of favour. Section6 is a
brief conclusion.
As will be seen, how linguistic complexity is conceived of, and how it might be
identified and measured, has itself never been agreed upon by linguists. It cannot
be neatly separated from theoretical considerations of where language structure
ends and language processing (or use) begins, or where variation (whether so-
cial or stylistic) is located.1 Indeed, one of the attractions of the equal complexity
* We wish to thank Emmon Bach, Cedric Boeckx, Julia S. Falk, Charles Fillmore, Morris Halle,
Samuel Jay Keyser, E.F.K. Koerner, D. Terence Langendoen, W. Keith Percival, Peter Trudgill,
and Hedde Zeijlstra for their helpful input on the subject matter of this paper, which was origi-
nally presented at the Annual Meeting of the North American Association for the History of the
Language Sciences, Portland, Oregon, 6 January 2012. We take full responsibility for any errors.
1. We shall see as well that discussions of the structural complexity of a language have not
always clearly separated it from perceptions of the primitive or advanced cultural level of its
speakers, though the overall trend was toward such a separation.
Historiographia Linguistica XXXIX:2 (2012), 341368. doi 10.1075/hl.39.2.08jos

issn 03025160 / e-issn 15699781 John Benjamins Publishing Company
342 John E. Joseph and Frederick J. Newmeyer
consensus was that such potentially intractable questions could be skirted. And
we ourselves shall skirt them in this article, the focus of which is on the broader
context in which the questions have been framed, in those periods when the con-
sensus did not prohibit framing them at all.
2. The idea of differential complexity

2.1 Differential complexity in scholarly writing in the 19th and 20th centuries
Throughout the 19th century the idea that languages differed from each other
in relative complexity was, with few exceptions, taken for granted. The gradual rise
of the modern European standard national languages in the Renaissance and after
had been accompanied by a discourse in which it was assumed that the classical
languages, Latin and Greek, possessed an expressive capacity, an eloquence, which
modern languages could match only if they underwent an elaboration that would
equip them with the structural and lexical complexity necessary for the complex
functions of an advanced civilization. This belief would be shaken by encounters
with other languages in the course of imperial expansion.
The complexity of languages spoken by people perceived as primitive did
not pose a problem, since it could be dismissed as evidence of an irrational lack
of mental economy (see Andresen 1990 and Lauzon 2010, on evaluations of
American Indian languages). But with Oriental peoples whose cultures were per-
ceived as highly advanced, there was a challenge, and a range of strategies were
adopted. Sanskrit was initially the hardest case, being possessed not only of great
morphological and syntactic complexity but also an intricate civilization and a
wide and varied literature, including a grammatical tradition beyond anything
Europeans had dreamed of. The problem was solved when it was demonstrated
that Sanskrit was in fact historically one with Latin and Greek and the other lan-
guages of the family now called Indo-European: their complexity became our
complexity. Indeed, Sanskrit became the pinnacle of our linguistic perfection, as
when Friedrich Schlegel (17721829) was struck by how it reveals Indo-European
structure in the most elaborated form, [] manifoldly rich, and at the same time
highly regular and simple, even in comparison with the Greek, Latin, and other
kindred languages of the West and North (1847 [18271830]: 395 [1855:385],
with elaborated substituted for artificial).2
2. [] hier gerade in der kunstreichsten Form, mannichfach reich, und zugleich hchst regel-
mig und einfach gefunden werden [] im Verhltni zu den griechisch-lateinischen, oder
zu andern ihr verwandten Sprachen des Abendlandes und des Nordens der Fall ist (Schlegel
1830:68). This is part of Schlegels argument against the sensualist theory of language originat-
ing in animal cries and mechanical repetition of sounds (and more generally, against the idea
that any single principle can explain the development of all languages). Since Sanskrit repre-
sents an earlier phase of Indo-European development, the sensualist account predicts that its
All Languages Are Equally Complex 343
On the other hand, Schlegel continued, in languages which appear to be at

the very lowest grade of intellectual culture [] we frequently observe, on a clos-
er acquaintanceship, a very bizarre elaborateness in their grammatical structure.
This is especially the case with the Basque and the Lapponian, and many of the
American languages (ibid., with a very bizarre elaborateness substituted for a
very high and elaborate degree of art).3 With Arabic, seen as having a high intel-
lectual culture, the strategy adopted was one of Orientalizing the language into
the Other, the mirror image. By the mid-19th century Arabic, and the Semitic
languages generally, would come to be characterized as entirely concrete and
physical in their conceptualization and expression, versus the Aryan languages,
particularly Greek, which had a unique capacity for abstraction (see Olender 1994,
2009).
Where matters came to a head was with regard to Chinese, especially Classical
Chinese, seen as a language of maximum structural simplicity that was the vehicle
of one of the most advanced cultures the world had known. Schlegel described
Chinese grammar as extremely poor, being in its basis extremely, not to say child-
ishly, simple and quite ungrammatical (1847 [18271830]: 395 [1855:385]).4 A
structure should be less elaborated than that of Greek and Latin, which developed later. But in
fact Sanskrit has the most elaborated (kunstreichsten) structure, and its richness is balanced by
regularity and simplicity.
3. [] Sprachen, welche noch der allerniedrigsten Stufe der geistigen Entwicklung anzugeh-
ren scheinen, [] den nherer Bekanntschaft eine uerst seltsame Knstlichkeit in ihrem Bau
und ihrer ganzen Structur, bemerkt und nachgewiesen worden, wie dies mit dem Baskischen
und Lapplndischen, und mit verschiedenen amerikanischen Sprachen geschehen ist (ibid.).
The very high and elaborate degree of art of the 1847 translation sounds like praise, when
the opposite is intended, as becomes clear two sentences later when Schlegel refers to diese ver-
schrobene und ungeschickte Knstlichkeit, rendered in 1847 as this excessive and inappropriate
expenditure of art. This is the second part of Schlegels fatal objection to the theory of sen-
sualist origins: it predicts that languages which are culturally impoverished should have a less
elaborated structure than do the languages of highly developed cultures, but in fact they show
an excessive degree of elaboration, not balanced out by regularity or simplicity as in Sanskrit.
The word we translate as elaborateness, Knstlichkeit, usually means artificiality, being made
by human art (Kunst) rather than as a product of nature. Here, the contrast is not between the
natural and the artificial, but has to do with the amount of human effort art, Kunst, the labor
of elaborate that has gone into its production. Knstlichkeit functions here as a doublet of the
kunstreichsten of the preceding sentence (see note 2 above); it is not unusual for kunstreichsten
to be translated as most elaborate.
4. [] sehr arm, und ihre Grundlage fast kindisch einfach, und ganz ungrammatisch geblie-
ben ist [] (Schlegel 1830:68). This too is part of Schlegels anti-sensualist argument: he con-
siders that all the elaboration of Chinese has gone into its very peculiar and complicated sys-
tem of writing, leaving the spoken language structurally prone to fostering miscommunication,
follower of Schlegels, Eugne Burnouf (18011852), introduced a historical per-

spective concerning the movement from periods of analysis, the breaking down of
language and thought into elemental units for purposes of creating understanding,
to periods of synthesis, in which the elemental units are rejoined in order to take
thought to its highest level of development, at which point civilization becomes
possible. For Burnouf (1825a, b), such a progression is characteristic of all lan-
guages, but they can differ profoundly in their rate of attaining it.
In these same years, Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835) was developing an
approach to language analysis which, in contrast to the commonsense notion that
a language is a collection of words, maintained that it is actually the grammatical
relations among words that are the backbone of the language, and that the means
by which those relations are signalled is what gives a language its fundamental
character. At the same time, Humboldt took pains to show that, from a point of
view that might be called functional, all languages can be considered as being on
the same level, and all of them contain all that is rigorously needed not only for
the correctness, but the perfection of expression (cited from Rmusat 1824:52;
translation from Joseph 1999:94).5
Two papers by Humboldt (182324, 1825) laying out this view drew a rap-
id and vociferous response from the leading French Sinologist of the day, Jean
Pierre Abel Rmusat (17881832), who recognized quite rightly that Humboldts
grammar-centered approach would play into the hands of those like Burnouf
(Rmusats former student) and Schlegel who did not share Humboldts professed
linguistic egalitarianism. Rmusat wrote:
To express grammatical relations solely by word order or by meaningful words
temporarily applied to this usage is, according to Mr von Humboldt, to use the
most imperfect and least satisfying means. Here a serious question arises: for one
of the most abundant languages of Asia, with the richest and most learned litera-
ture, has, according to the most recent discoveries, no other resources than those
which Mr von Humboldt names here []. (Rmusat 1824:55, translation from
Joseph 1999:95)6
hence dysfunctional. Where the sensualist account depends on progress in language structure,
Chinese exhibits regress in Schlegels view.
5. [] toutes les langues peuvent tre considres comme tant au mme niveau, [] elles
renferment, les unes comme les autres, tout ce qui est rigoureusement ncessaire non-seulement
la justesse, mais la perfection de lexpression.
6. Exprimer les rapports grammaticaux par la seule position des mots ou par des mots signifi-
catifs appliqus temporairement cet usage, cest, suivant M. de Humboldt, employer le mode le
plus imparfait et le moins satisfaisant. Ici sleverait une question grave; car lune des langues les
Humboldt penned a long reply (Humboldt 1826) that follows the rhetorical tradi-
tion of the time in laying out a thesis and antithesis before drawing a synthesis from
them (see Joseph 1999, 2012a). The thesis is that Chinese has all the excellence
Rmusat imputes to it, and that this excellence resides in the relation of language
to pure logic, which stands above human thinking. The antithesis is that Chinese
has the imperfections implied by Burnouf, and that these reside in the relation of
language to style, in which human thinking is developed to its highest form. The
synthesis which, methodologically, represents the closest approximation to the
truth is that each of these views is correct within its particular realm: Chinese
has the ideal structure for the formulation and expression of pure ideas, while the
inflecting languages, particularly Sanskrit and Greek, have the ideal structure for
the formulation and expression of human thought.
This compromise did not stop objections to Humboldts approach being
mounted on other fronts, notably in defence of the American Indian languages
by his American correspondents John Pickering (17771846) and Peter Stephen
Duponceau (17811844). However, here too Humboldts position was egalitarian:
Those American languages which we know best have a great regularity and very
few anomalies in their structure; their grammar at least offers no visible traces
of mixture [] (Humboldt 1827 [1826]:78, translation extended from Joseph
1999:136).7
In any case, the anthropological view that all cultures (or at least authentic
ones) are rich, and that all peoples ways of thinking are intrinsically logical and
valid, was bound to be a minority position so long as the majority continued to
divide the world into civilized and savage. The balance of views was shifting across
the decades of the 19th century, but the lack of any steady progress is shown by the
rise and consequences of anti-Semitism and racial segregation and oppression in
civilized Europe and America.
Later in the century, in his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin (18091882) saw
in the apparent complexity of many non-Western languages a potential threat to
the idea that Homo sapiens arose through descent with modification in the same
manner as did other species in the natural world. If such was to the case, then how
could less advanced peoples have more complex languages? Darwin attempted to
plus abondantes de lAsie, celle dont la littrature est la plus riche et la plus savante, na, selon les
dcouvertes les plus rcentes, dautres ressources que celles dont parle ici M. de Humboldt [].
7. Celles des langues amricaines que nous connaissons le plus parfaitement, possdent une
grande rgularit et bien peu danomalies dans leur structure; leur grammaire, au moins, noffre
pas de traces visibles de mlange []. For Walls (2009:184), It is important to note that
Wilhelm [von Humboldt] could have treated languages as racial entities. He did not. Bunzl
(1996) also argues against any notion that Humboldt believed in racial superiority.
solve this problem by drawing a curious analogy with the marine animals known
as crinoids. Crinoids appear to be highly complex, containing:
no less than 150,000 pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiat-
ing lines; but a naturalist does not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect
than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none of these parts
alike, excepting on the opposite sides of the body. He justly considers the differ-
entiation and specialisation of organs as the test of perfection. So with languages:
the most symmetrical and complex ought not to be ranked above irregular, ab-
breviated, and bastardised languages, which have borrowed expressive words and
useful forms of construction from various conquering, conquered, or immigrant
races. (Darwin 1871:6162)
Darwin concluded that the extremely complex and regular construction of many
barbarous languages is no proof that they owe their origin to a special act of cre-
ation (ibid., p.62).
In linguistics, dominated in this period by the historical reconstruction of the
Indo-European mother language, the sort of structural relativism that Darwin in-
voked in his evolutionary argument had been implicitly accepted. No one spoke
any longer of levels of civilization in scientific discourse on language; even Otto
Jespersens (18601943) Progress in Language (1894) is an attempt to extend this
relativism from scientific to popular discourse. The lectures on general linguistics
of the historical grammarian (as he considered himself) Ferdinand de Saussure
(18571913) are noteworthy for their lack of comment on structural complexity
or racial superiority, as might be expected from an exponent of the fundamental
arbitrariness of language (F. de Saussure 1916); but this contrasts starkly with the
writings of his brother Lopold (18661925) on the use of French by natives of
Indochina and its implications for colonial policy (see L. de Saussure 1899; Joseph
2012b:441445).
The pioneers of anthropological and distributional linguistics in the first third
of the 20th century had few compunctions about identifying individual languag-
es as being relatively simple or complex. For example, Franz Boas (18581942)
one of the staunchest opponents of racism of his time offered the opinion
that Many primitive languages are complex and noted that On the whole, the
development of language seems to be such, that the nicer distinctions are elimi-
nated, and that it begins with complex and ends with simpler forms, although
it must be acknowledged that opposite tendencies are not by any means absent
(Boas 1938:160). His student Edward Sapir (18841939) saw things in an analo-
gous fashion. Some have taken the following famous quote as an assertion of equal
complexity:
When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd,
and Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam. (Sapir 1921:219)
But Sapir had no intention of implying by this quote that all languages are equally
complex, as is evidenced by his preceding sentence:
Both simple and complex types of languages of an indefinite number of varieties
may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural advance.
Leonard Bloomfield (18871949) too saw languages differing in their overall com-
plexity. Interestingly, the very last page of his landmark book Language (1933) was
devoted to the differential complexity of modern languages vis--vis their histori-
cal antecedents. He wrote that Even now it is clear that change in language tends
toward shorter and more regularly constructed words (Bloomfield 1933:509), a
process that he explicitly described as simplification. The ultimate outcome [of
language change] may be the state of affairs which we see in Chinese, where each
word is a morpheme and every practical feature that receives expression receives it
in the shape of a word or phrase.
2.2 Differential complexity in popular opinion

In this paper we do not attempt to document exhaustively the conventional
opinion that languages can vary to striking degrees in their complexity. Given the
uncontroversial fact that such opinion is the norm, we provide only one illustra-
tive example. The 1956 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records identi-
fied the worlds most primitive language (Sampson 2009a:227). The choice was
the Australian language Arunta (now generally referred to as Aranda), in which
words are indeterminate in meaning and form.8
Suffice it to say that every professional linguist has encountered the view ex-
pressed among even their most highly educated friends that languages differ in
complexity. Indeed, most laypeople seem to hold the even stronger view that dif-
ferential linguistic complexity is a reflection of differential cultural complexity. We
know of no introduction to linguistics published for many decades that has not
addressed and opposed this lay view. Examples of introductory texts that address
the weaker view of differential linguistic complexity and attempt to refute it appear
in 4 below.
8. . Dixon (1984:63) mentions that the Australian journalist Philip Wilson asked him the sort
of questions his listeners might have put. When Dixon described his field work on the indig-
enous languages of Australia, Wilson replied: You mean the Aborigines have a language? I
thought it was just a few grunts and groans.
3. The turn towards the idea of equal complexity

We have seen various reactions to the perceived different levels of complexity
in the structure of languages: that they are tied to different levels of civilization,
or to cultures that emphasize the concrete rather than the abstract, or ideas rather
than thought; that these levels might represent different stages of a universal and
inevitable historical development, either from simplicity to complexity or the re-
verse; or that they connect to nothing at all. What was not articulated by any of
those cited above is the idea that all languages are equally complex. The first quote
that we have found that explicitly puts forward the idea of equal complexity is
from an article published in 1954 by Rulon S. Wells III (19192008):
Again, one can isolate the complexity of a language in phonemics, in morphopho-
nemics, in tactics, etc.; but these isolable properties may hang together in such
a way that the total complexity of a language is approximately the same for all
languages. (Wells 1954:104)
In a footnote on the same page, Wells cites a personal communication from Charles
F. Hockett (19162000) on 2 August 1952 for having suggested the idea. Just a year
after the Wells article, the idea of equal complexity had found its way into the
Encyclopdia Britannica article on Language by George L. Trager (19061992):
All languages of today are equally complex and equally adequate to express all the
facets of the speakers culture, and all can be expanded and modified as needed.
There are no primitive languages, but all languages seem to be equally old and
equally developed. (Trager 1955:698)9
It is now standard for introductions to linguistics to make that same point.

Consider examples from three popular introductory texts:
There are no primitive languages all languages are equally complex and equal-
ly capable of expressing any idea in the universe. (Fromkin & Rodman 1983:16)
Contrary to popular belief, all languages have grammars that are roughly equal in
complexity (OGrady, Dobrovolsky & Aronoff 1989:10)
Although it is obvious that specific languages differ from each other on the sur-
face, if we look closer we find that human languages are at a similar level of com-
9. Within a few years this entry would be revised by Joshua Whatmough (18971964), Professor
of Comparative Philology at Harvard and founder of its Linguistics Department. In the new ver-
sion the four instances of equally in this passage have been removed: All languages of today
are highly complex and are adequate to express all the facets of the speakers culture, and all
can be expanded and modified to meet changing circumstances. There are no languages which
could justifiably be called primitive (Trager & Whatmough 1966:699). Whether Trager ap-
proved the change we do not know. See further note 15 below.
plexity and detail there is no such thing as a primitive language. (Akmajian,

Demers, Farmer & Harnish 1997:8)
The abovementioned texts share a generative orientation. But many non-genera-

tive linguists have also stressed equal complexity:
It appears to linguists that all languages are equally complex and structured.
(Trudgill 1975:25)
It is a finding of modern linguistics that all languages are roughly equal in terms
of overall complexity. (Dixon 1997:118)10
Obviously, the size of the vocabulary and the variety and sophistication of literary
forms will depend on the culture. The grammar of all languages, however, tends
to be about equally complex although the complexity may be found in different
places. Latin, for instance, has a much richer system of inflections than English,
but a less complicated syntax. (Covington & Rosenfelder 2010 [a web page de-
voted to FAQs about language])
Finally, the assertion of equal complexity has appeared in a treatise on language

change, a published lecture on the relationship between language and thought, a
book on Indo-European language and culture, and a popular book about recent
genetic discoveries respectively:
[M]odern languages, attested extinct ones, and even reconstructed ones are all
at much the same level of structural complexity or communicative efficiency.
(McMahon 1994:324)
No one can claim that any of the five thousand or so human languages is more ad-
vanced or more developed or more complex than any other. (Bickerton 1995:67)
A central finding of linguistics has been that all languages, both ancient and mod-
ern, spoken by both primitive and advanced societies, are equally complex in
their structure. (Fortson 1997:4)
All human people speak languages of comparable grammatical complexity,
even those isolated in the highlands of New Guinea since the Stone Age. (Ridley
1999:94)
In the following section we discuss the circumstances that led to the (virtual) con-
sensus of equal complexity in the second half of the 20th century.
10. Later in the same book, Dixon hedges his assertion somewhat: There is a mistaken belief
among some linguists that all languages are equal. While it is the case that all languages are
roughly equal (that is, no language is six times as complex as any other, and there are no primi-
tive languages), it is by no means the case that they are exactly equal. [] There is no doubt
that one language may have greater overall grammatical complexity and/or a communicative
advantage in a certain sphere, over another (Dixon 1972:75).
4. The arguments for equal complexity

Three independent currents converged to make the hypothesis of equal com-
plexity practically inevitable by the 1950s. For simplicitys sake we refer to them as
humanism, language processing, and theory-internal considerations. The first is
the hypothesis that since all human groups are in a fundamental sense equal, their
languages must be equal too; the second is based on the idea that in order to keep
languages useable, complexity in one part of the grammar is necessarily balanced
out by simplicity in another part of the grammar; the third is that the nature of
linguistic structure and tools for its analysis (what came to be called universal
grammar) demands that all languages be equally complex. We discuss them in
4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 respectively.11
4.1 Humanism
Boas was a key source of the humanistic component of the equal complexity
idea, following on from William Dwight Whitney (18271894), discussed in 4.2,
and also from Americanists such as Duponceau, Pickering and later Horatio Hale
(18171896). There was a growing debate among anthropologists in the first half
of the 20th century about cultural evolution, and particularly about present-day
cultures representing different evolutionary stages. This view itself represented a
step toward non-judgemental egalitarianism: it said that different peoples were not
inherently more primitive or their cultures (including their languages) inherently
less complex, but rather that they were all on the same evolutionary ladder, with
some just happening to be a few rungs ahead or behind. In his introduction to the
1979 Dover reprint of Whitney (1875), Hockett wrote that
Some attitudes have altered. Nineteenth-century scholarship firmly held that
some dialects, languages, cultures, and species are inherently better or higher
than others. That yielded a typology in the form of a linear evolutionary scale, so
that if two languages differed in any essential way it could only be that one was
less fully evolved than the other. Whitney often seems torn between that attitude
and the disinterested egalitarianism of natural science, and the modern reader
is pleased at the frequency with which the latter gets the upper hand. (Hockett
1979:xvi)
In effect, then, there were three positions, which we will call the inherentist one,
the evolutionary one and the egalitarian one.
Boas was the figure pushing hardest for movement toward the egalitarian po-
sition, and we suspect that some of the seeming contradictions found in his writ-
ings (as well as in those of Whitney and Sapir) may have to do with the fact that,
11. The arguments based on humanism and language processing are discussed briefly in
Maddieson (2007).
well into the 1930s, most people still took the inherentist position as a matter of
common sense. They would have dismissed the egalitarian one outright as absurd,
yet they might have been persuaded by the evolutionary one. Thus, Boas, although
leading the charge against the cultural evolutionists in his own field, may have
adopted part of their outlook when addressing an audience dominated by inher-
entists. For that reason, we do not find Boas explicitly claiming that all languages
are of equal complexity.
In parallel with this question was the one of whether language structure was
connected to culture or autonomous from it. Positions on this issue did not ad-
vance in lock-step with positions on linguistic complexity. In particular, the lin-
guistic anthropologists could not very well argue for autonomy of language vis-
-vis culture, when their methodology was based on locating the one within the
other. Yet such autonomy seems to be implied by the idea that linguistic systems
always establish an identical structural equilibrium, regardless of who uses them.
Boas focussed on the lack of correlation between complexity and culture, rath-
er than on equal complexity per se. The explicit dissociation of linguistic complex-
ity from cultural complexity removed an obstacle to the idea that all humans were
inherently equal. Once the dissociation was accepted, it would be useless to seek
justification for human inequality on the basis of putative linguistic inequality,
thereby removing one obstacle to the conclusion that languages cannot and should
not be ranked in terms of their complexity.
Indeed, before long it came to be accepted on humanistic grounds that the
very idea of a complexity ranking for languages was racist in its theoretical foun-
dations and abhorrent in its application to real world practice. Recent challenges
to the equal complexity hypothesis have been explicit in attributing ideological
motives to those who uphold it:
For the descriptivist school, I believe the assumption of invariance of total lan-
guage complexity as between different languages was motivated largely by ideo-
logical considerations. The reason why linguistics was worth studying, for many
descriptivists, was that it helped to demonstrate that all men are brothers
Mankind is not divided into a group of civilized nations or races who think and
speak in subtle and complex ways, and another group of primitive societies with
crudely simple languages. (Sampson 2009b:4)
As David Gil put it tersely (2001:326):

[S]ome people seem to think that if one language were shown to be more complex
than another, then it would follow that the latter language is in some sense infe-
rior, which in turn would entail that the speakers of that language are inferior, and
from here were only one short step to ethnic cleansing.
Gils reductio ad absurdum would be more blatantly absurd if it did not fall within
living memory of when Nazi genocidal policy found support from linguists, who
were ready to furnish scientific evidence that Jews were not human because they
spoke parasitic languages (see Hutton 1999). But even the best-intentioned ide-
ology, such as the one motivating Gils reductio, is still an obstacle to clear ob-
servation. In this case the ideology is itself problematic: it depends on the same
equating of complexity with superiority that underlies the racism it opposes. The
two need instead to be detached from one another, as Boas tried to do. A simpler
structure might as easily be reckoned to possess a superior evolutionary sleekness
as an inferior primitiveness.
4.2 Language processing

The idea that language processing or the use of language in general guar-
antees that complexity in one domain is counterbalanced by simplicity in another
is a very old one. In fact, this idea is explicit in the following remark by Whitney in
his Life and Growth of Language, first published in 1875:
[T]he means of formal expression are of the utmost variety; they are not to be
sought in one department of a language only, but in all; they are scattered through
the whole vocabulary, as well as concentrated in the grammatical apparatus.
Deficiency in one department may be compensated, or more than compensated,
by provision of resources in another. (Whitney 1875:222)
The degree of Whitneys commitment to this proposition is debatable, however,

since just a few pages later he wrote:
Language comes to be just what its users make it; its offices correspond to their
capacities; if there is a higher degree of formative structure in one language than
in another, the reason lies in the difference of quality of the two races, their differ-
ent capacity of education and growth []. (Ibid., p.227)
Towards the end of the 19th century the French linguist Paul Passy (18591940)
hypothesized that phonological change is a series of trade-offs. Passy (1890:227)
proposed two fundamental principles of language change: Language tends con-
stantly to get rid of what is superfluous and language tends constantly to high-
light what is necessary.12 The constant battle between these two principles guar-
antees that over time, there will not be any overall increase or decrease of linguistic
complexity.
At around the same time, Georg von der Gabelentz (18401893) put his finger
on an opposition that was to play a major role in 20th-century functionalism. He
12. [L]e langage tend constamment se dbarrasser de ce qui est superflu and le langage tend
constamment mettre en relief ce qui est ncessaire.
contrasted two opposing drives: that of the speaker for comfort (Bequemlichkeit,
ease of production), and that of the hearer for clarity (Deutlichkeit, ease of per-
ception) (Gabelentz 1891:191195). The demands of successful communication
guarantee that grammatical systems can never stray too far on behalf of one of
these drives at the expense of the other.13
The idea of complexity trade-offs was hinted at or explicitly endorsed through-
out the early 20th century. Boas for example remarked:
Since, however, ideas must be expressed by being reduced to a number of related
ideas, the kinds of relation become important elements in articulate speech; and
it follows that all languages must contain formal elements, and that their number
must be the greater, the fewer the elementary phonetic groups that define special
ideas. In a language which commands a very large, fixed vocabulary, the number
of formal elements may become quite small. (Boas 1911:27)
Roman Jakobson (18961982), at one and the same time commenting on and en-
dorsing the ideas of Viggo Brndal (18871942), wrote:
But recently Viggo Brndal, the great Danish linguist who died on the same day as
Boas, pointed out the general linguistic tendency to avoid an excessive complexity
within a morphological formation: often forms which are complex in regard to
one category of classification, are relatively simple in regard to another category.
In accordance with this law of compensation plural as a grammatical number,
which is more thoroughly specified than singular, usually contains a smaller and
never a larger set of distinctions. (Jakobson 1971 [1959]:487)14
And Andr Martinet (19081999) emphasized over and over again that languages
represent an uneasy balance resulting from the conflicting needs of their users and
from the consequences of having to deal with purely physical asymmetries in the
vocal tract:
At every stage, the structure of language is nothing but the unstable balance be-
tween the needs of communication, which require more numerous and more spe-
cific units [] and mans inertia, which favours less numerous, less specific, and
more frequently occurring units. It is the interplay of these two main factors that
constitutes the essentials of linguistic economy. (Martinet 1962:139)
Hockett explicitly gave a language use-based explanation for his belief that lan-
guages do not differ significantly in terms of complexity:
13. Optimality-theoretic phonology (Kager 1999) is a modern instantiation of Gabelentzs op-

posing drives: markedness constraints reflect the speakers interests, faithfulness constraints
those of the hearer.
14. Actually, the two died a week apart, Brndal on 14 December 1942, Boas on 21 December.
Objective measurement is difficult, but impressionistically it would seem that the

total grammatical complexity of any language, counting both morphology [word
structure] and syntax [sentence structure], is about the same as any other. This
is not surprising, since all languages have about equally complex jobs to do, and
what is not done morphologically [] has to be done syntactically []. Fox [],
with a more complex morphology than English, thus ought to have a somewhat
simpler syntax; and this is the case. (Hockett 1958:180)
Since all languages have the same job to do (whatever that might mean concrete-
ly), it follows, according to Hockett, that complexity in one area must be balanced
by simplicity in another.
Examples of complexity tradeoffs are not hard to find. One of the best known
is at least a century old. Rich case marking tends to correlate with flexible word
order (see Siewierska 1998 for the relevant statistics). Consider the history of those
Indo-European languages which have lost much case marking but have developed
more rigid order. Or take a phonological example: uncontroversially, we think,
complex syllable structure correlates with low tonal complexity (Matisoff 1973).
Another example that has been cited to support the idea of complexity trade-offs is
that Chinese and typologically similar languages, which have a simple (isolating)
morphosyntax and individual morphemes that are multiply ambiguous, tend to
have both constructions situated at the intersection between the lexicon and pro-
ductive syntax like classifiers, reduplication, compounding, and verb serialization
(see Riddle 2008 for Hmong, Mandarin, and Thai) and complex rules of inference
and complex rules interfacing form and meaning (see Bisang 2009 for Khmer,
Thai, and late Archaic Chinese). Complexity trade-offs continue to be proposed to
this day, their existence bolstering the idea of all languages manifesting the same
degree of overall complexity.
4.3 Theory-internal considerations

It is not easy to pin down precisely the origins of the argument that linguistic
theory itself dictates that all languages must be equally complex. By the 1930s it
was generally accepted within structural linguistics that all languages were analyz-
able by the same methods.15 There were no methods to be applied to languages
15. As ever, exceptions can be found. As late as 1959 the leading Swedish structuralist Bertil
Malmberg (19131994) could endorse (in Malmberg 1964 [1959]:185) the view of Gordon M.
Messing (19172002), longtime professor of classics and linguistics at Cornell, that the struc-
turalists err in approaching a culture language [sic] say French in precisely the same spirit
in which they approach a non-culture language [sic] like Eskimo (Messing 1951:5; it is per-
haps no coincidence that Messing was a classicist like Whatmough, who appears to have struck
through Tragers claims of equal complexity in their Encyclopdia Britannica article, as dis-
cussed in note 9 above). Conversely, when the Dutch comparativist Jan Gonda (19051991)
spoken by people with a long history of literacy that were not also applicable to
those whose speakers had no written language at all. Such a view of course is not
inconsistent with the idea that languages might differ wildly in terms of their over-
all complexity. But we suspect that a natural, if not logical, conclusion from the
hypothesis of equal methodology is one of equal complexity. In any event, with
the advent of generative grammar the idea that the theory itself demands that all
languages must be equally complex came to the fore.
Turning to generative grammar, as early as the 1950s, Chomsky was character-
izing the grammars of all languages as being essentially comparable, despite the
great complexity of each one:
The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of
great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are some-
how specially designed to do this, with data-handling or hypothesis-formulating
ability of unknown character and complexity. (Chomsky 1959:57)
The earliest versions of generative grammar, however, had no formal level for cap-
turing the essential similarities manifested by the worlds languages. That level,
introduced in Chomsky (1965), was deep structure:
Modern work has indeed shown a great diversity in the surface structure of lan-
guages. However, since the study of deep structure has not been its concern, it has
not attempted to show a corresponding diversity of underlying structures, and, in
fact, the evidence that has been accumulated in modern study of language does
not appear to suggest anything of this sort. (Chomsky 1965:118)
The above quote leaves open the possibility that surface structures might differ
markedly in complexity from language to language. Fifteen years later, however,
Chomsky seemed to dismiss such an idea:
if, say, a Martian superorganism were looking at us, it might determine that
from its point of view the variations of brains, of memories and languages, are
rather trivial, just like the variations in the size of hearts, in the way they function,
and so on; and it might be amused to discover that the intellectual tradition of its
subjects assumes otherwise. (Chomsky 1980:77)
If we interpret Chomskys use of the word trivial in the sense of negligible, then
one would be hard-pressed not to read into the above quote the implied assertion
wrote that the comparative method was inapplicable to many non-Western languages, which
share properties (like reduplication) with the speech of children [and] the uncultivated or less
cultivated classes and groups of our own society (Gonda 1948:90), his position was immedi-
ately blasted by Trager as a counsel of despair, where it is not sheer ethnocentric racism (Trager
1948:209).
that all languages are (close to being) equally complex.16 By a decade later,
Chomsky had taken one further step toward the equal complexity hypothesis:
It has been suggested that the parameters of UG relate, not to the computational
system, but only to the lexicon []. If this proposal can be maintained in a natu-
ral form, there is only one human language, apart from the lexicon, and language
acquisition is in essence a matter of determining lexical idiosyncrasies. Properties
of the lexicon too are sharply constrained, by UG or other systems of the mind/
brain. If substantive elements (verbs, nouns, and so on) are drawn from an in-
variant universal category, then only functional elements will be parameterized.
(Chomsky 1991:419)
If there is indeed only one human language, then it would be otiose to attempt to
compare (illusively different) languages in terms of their relative complexity. One
could, of course, maintain that lexical idiosyncrasies differ in complexity in a pro-
found manner from one language to another (for the development of such an idea,
see 5 below). But that does not appear to be Chomskys position. In the course
of a discussion of the cost of language-particular lexical peculiarities like having
a special preposition to mark grammatical roles (where cost seems equivalent to
complexity), Chomskys interviewers interrupted his narrative with the question:
All languages ought to be equally costly, in this sense? Chomsky replied: Yes,
they ought to be (Chomsky 2004:165166).
It needs to be stressed that, as far as we know, Chomsky has never precise-
ly asserted that all languages are equally complex. Given his general intellectual
style, we doubt that he would even consider such an assertion to be intellectu-
ally respectable. Nevertheless, his closest supporters have not shrunk from mak-
ing such a claim.17 The first citation below is from a semi-technical exposition of
Chomskys ideas whose opening two sentences are Why is Chomsky important?
He has shown that there is really only one human language: that the immense
complexity of the innumerable languages we hear around us must be variations on
16. Deutscher (2010) interpreted Chomskys claim in just such a manner. On the other hand,
if one were to interpret the intended meaning of trivial as no more than uninteresting (in ac-
cord with Chomskys customary use of the term), then it is not so obvious that Chomsky was
asserting the equal complexity of all languages. In the overall scheme of things, the differences
between some property p and some property q might well be trivial and uninteresting with-
out p and q necessarily manifesting the same degree of complexity, as the parallel example of
memories makes clear.]
17. In the late 1960s one of us (Newmeyer) studied at the University of Illinois, the first genera-
tive grammar-oriented department outside of MIT. The memory is still vivid of Robert B. Lees
(19221996), the chair of the department at that time and Newmeyers Ph.D. advisor (as well as
Chomskys first student), remarking in class that the idea of an innate universal grammar shared
by all humans is incompatible with one language being more complex than another.
a single theme (Smith 1999:1). The second citation is from a technical work that
contains a glowing Foreword by Chomsky:
Although there are innumerable languages in the world, it is striking that they
are all equally complex (or simple) and that a child learns whatever language it is
exposed to. (Smith 1999:168)
Similarly, if we assume biologically determined guidance [in language acquisition],
we need to assume that languages do not vary in complexity. (Moro 2008:112)
5. Recent challenges to the equal complexity hypothesis

The most concerted challenges to the idea of equal complexity have come from
the direction of sociolinguistics rather than grammatical theory. At least since the
1980s sociolinguists have stressed that the degree of complexity of a language is
in part due to factors such as its degree of contact or lack of contact with other
languages, its relative prestige vis--vis its neighbours, its overall number of speak-
ers, its role as a lingua franca, and other sociopolitical considerations. Current
research supporting such an idea has its origins in a presentation entitled On the
Rise of the Creoloid by Peter Trudgill in March 1979, given at the International
Conference of Historical Linguistics at Stanford.18 This paper later appeared as
Chapter5 of Trudgill (1983), where we find the assertion that it is legitimate to
suggest that some languages actually are easier for adults to learn, in an absolute
sense, than others (p.106). Trudgill recalls:
The published reviews of the book that I saw were all by sociolinguists and anth-
rolinguists who were quite used to the notion of simplification and therefore, I
suppose, didnt react antagonistically. And indeed since then all the (very polite)
outrage that Ive received has been after oral presentations. (Personal communica-
tion, 15 February 2012)
It would appear then that linguists focusing on language and culture had never
ceased to be a receptive audience for the view that languages might differ in com-
plexity.
Grammatical theorists, on the other hand, have long been torn between the
seeming requirement of universal grammar for all languages to manifest the same
18. For a comprehensive account of Trudgills views on the sociolinguistics of complexity, see
Trudgill (2011). Trudgill was not the first to link the complexity of a languages grammar to
external sociopolitical factors. For example, Jakobson (1971 [1929]:82) had written decades be-
fore that It is not rare to observe that the tendency to simplify the phonological system grows
in proportion to the range of use of a dialect, with the greatest heterogeneity among speakers
of the generalized language (Il nest pas rare dobserver que la tendance simplifier le systme
phonologique crot mesure que grandit le rayon demploi dun dialecte, avec la plus grande
htrognit des sujets parlant la langue gnralise. (Our English transl.: JEJ & FJN).
degree of complexity and the quite startling apparent differences in complexity

from one language to another. Nowhere has this conflict played out in the litera-
ture more than in the analysis of creole languages. Traditionally, it was consid-
ered uncontroversial that creoles are simpler than non-creoles (see, for example,
Schuchardt 1980); the controversies involved making precise the particular socio-
historical circumstances giving rise to the simplification. Derek Bickerton adapted
the creoles-are-simpler hypothesis into generative grammar by positing that such
languages manifest (or come close to manifesting) the most unmarked parameter
settings allowed by universal grammar (Bickerton 1984; see also Roberts 1999). The
hypothesis that the lexicon is the locus of parametric differences among languages
(see above, 4.3) allowed for creoles to be analysed as simpler than non-creoles,
while at the same time maintaining the hypothesis that, lexical differences aside, all
languages manifest the same degree of complexity. However, there has been a de-
termined resistance within the generative community to what is sometimes called
creole exceptionalism (see Muysken 1988, DeGraff 2001). It has to be said that this
debate has at times passed the limits of what is normally considered acceptable aca-
demic interchange, with veiled accusations of racism and worse. Be that as it may, it
is our impression that most grammatical theorists, regardless of their orientation,
would now agree that in some significant way creoles are simpler than noncreoles.
The idea that one parameter setting might be more marked than another has
been exploited by a number of generative linguists as a means of characterizing
the differential complexity of one grammar vis--vis another. Some proposals in-
volving complexity-inducing marked settings have treated preposition-stranding
in English and a few other Germanic languages (Riemsdijk 1978, Hornstein &
Weinberg 1981), the inconsistent head-complement orderings in Chinese (Huang
1982, Travis 1989), and unexpected (i.e., typologically rare) orderings of nouns,
determiners, and numerals in a variety of languages (Cinque 1996). In a pre-para-
metric version of generative syntax, Joseph Emonds (1980) had hypothesized that
verb-initial languages are rarer than verb-medial languages because their deriva-
tion is more complex, as it involves a marked movement rule not required for the
latter group of languages. Baker (2001) reinterpreted Emondss analysis in terms of
marked lexical parameters. And Newmeyer (2011) has pointed out that every ver-
sion of generative syntax has posited syntactic-like rules that apply in the periph-
ery or in the mapping from syntax to phonology and are hence exempt from the
constraints that might force core grammar or the narrow syntactic component
to manifest equal degrees of complexity in every language.19
19. Joseph (2000) considers potential implications of a view such as Emondss (pp.35) as well
as offering a history of the coreperiphery (and related) distinctions within generative syntax
(pp.183192).
The question of complexity has resurged as a result of the current debate on

the centrality of recursive rules in human language. The standard position among
linguistic theorists has long been that all languages have subordination (Fromkin
& Rodman 1983:123). Indeed, such an idea has acquired virtually axiomatic sta-
tus. Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002:1569), putting forward the position of the
Minimalist Program, hypothesize that FLN [roughly, universal grammar JEJ
& FJN] only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of
the faculty of language. It follows from such a hypothesis that a language lack-
ing recursion is excluded from the realm of possibility for theoretical reasons; if
however such a language were found to exist, then it would not be far-fetched to
describe it as simpler than other languages. Daniel Everett claims to have found
such a language, namely Pirah, spoken in Brazilian Amazonia (see Everett 2005,
2008, 2009).20 Reinforcing his claim that Pirah is less complex than other lan-
guages, Everett has also argued that this language lacks quantifiers, numbers, co-
lour terms, and much more. Partly because of the sheer audacity of the various
claims and partly because the nonrecursivity of Pirah challenges directly what is
now taken to be a defining characteristic of Chomskys view of language, Everetts
work has received attention in the nonscholarly press, as is attested by the review of
Everett (2008) in The New Yorker (Colapinto 2007). Resistance to Everetts claims
within the world of theoretical linguistics has been fierce (e.g., Nevins, Pesetsky &
Rodrigues 2009). It is difficult to assess the degree of acceptance of Everetts spe-
cific proposals among generativists, though it seems safe to say that neither he nor
his opponents has won a knock-down victory.
At the same time, research in the past few decades has cast doubt on the idea
that complexity in one area of the grammar is necessarily counterbalanced by
simplicity in another. For example, according to David Gil (2007, 2008, 2009),
Riau Indonesian has (almost) no word-internal morphological structure, distinct
syntactic categories, or construction specific rules of semantic interpretation. Gil
insists that as a result of Riaus bare-bones structures, the typical sentence of this
language is vague, not ambiguous, and hence Riau does not have more complex
rules of semantic interpretation to compensate for its simple morphosyntax. Along
the same lines, Ian Maddieson (1984) has pointed to cases where we do not find
trade offs in phonology: languages with large consonant inventories tend also to
20. Well over a century ago, Eduard Hermann (18691950) argued that Proto-Indo-European
lacked clausal subordination (Hermann 1895). In the 1970s, Ken Hale (19342001) put forward
the same position with respect to Warlpiri and other Australian languages (Hale 1976). Hales
views, which are critically addressed in Nordlinger (2006), attracted little attention at the time,
presumably because the presence or absence of subordination in a language was not considered
a hot button issue.
have large vowel inventories; few manner contrasts for stops and fricatives are not
compensated for by more place contrasts; and languages with simpler segmental
inventories tend to have less elaborate suprasegmental properties.
All of the above has contributed to an atmosphere in which linguists of all
stripes are increasingly willing to entertain the idea that one language might in-
deed be simpler or more complex than another.
The first decade of this century saw several important symposia on the topic
of linguistic complexity. The pioneering conference, entitled The Grammatical
Complexity of Natural Languages, was sponsored by the Academy of Finland and
took place in April 2005 in Helsinki. Following soon thereafter, a workshop on
Approaches to Language Complexity, organized by K. David Harrison and Ryan
K. Shosted, was held at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in
January 2007; a Workshop on Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable took
place in April 2007 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig; and the same month a conference on Recursion in Human Languages
was organized by Daniel Everett at Illinois State University (recursion being the
hottest-button issue in discussions of complexity). The proceedings of the Helsinki
and Leipzig meetings have been published as Miestamo, Sinnemki & Karlsson
(eds.) (2008) and Sampson, Gil & Trudgill (eds.) (2009), respectively. The great
majority of the papers in these two volumes take the position that all languages are
not equally complex. It seems to us that these volumes both reflect and have helped
to reinforce the growing view that languages may differ in their degree of complex-
ity. Indeed, a major review of Sampson et al. (eds.) (2009), written by a committed
generative grammarian, offers the opinion that the question of whether all lan-
guages are equally complex seems hardly worth discussing. It probably is pushing
at an open door [] (Faarlund 2010:752).
The question remains of how degrees of linguistic complexity can actually be
measured and compared. There have long been proposals for measuring the de-
gree of complexity of individual grammatical components. One thinks of Sapirs
formulas for morphological typology (Sapir 1921) and its revision in Greenberg
(1960). Chomsky & Halle (1968) explicitly regarded their feature-based evalua-
tion metric for phonology as providing a measure of phonological complexity.
And Hawkins (2004), building on a tradition deriving from Miller & Chomsky
(1963), has addressed and quantified morphosyntactic complexity from a process-
ing point of view. But, in fact, no comprehensive proposal exists to date for mea-
suring the degree of complexity of an entire language, nor is there even agreement
on precisely what should be measured. The programmatic sketches for measuring
complexity have ranged from what might be called grammar-based to those that
might be called user-based. The former focus on elements of grammars per se
and gauge the amount of structural elaboration, irregularity, and so on (for an
example, see McWhorter 2007). The latter approach complexity in terms of the
degree of difficulty for the user, whether the first-language acquirer, the second-
language acquirer, or the adult user. For example, Trudgill (2011) suggests that
the most promising method for measuring complexity would be to attempt to
determine if some languages are, in an absolute sense, more difficult for second-
language learners than others. And no comprehensive proposal at all exists, so far
as we know, for factoring in what might be called interpretive complexity, that is,
the relative difficulty from one language to another for a hearer to assign a seman-
tic and pragmatic interpretation to an utterance. Given the renewed interest in the
subject, it seems likely that the coming years will see more concrete proposals for
measuring the degree of complexity that languages may manifest.
6. Conclusion
Throughout most of the history of the discipline, linguists have had little hesi-
tation in comparing languages in terms of their relative complexity, whether or not
they extrapolated judgements of superiority or inferiority from such comparisons.
By the mid 20th century, however, a consensus had arisen that all languages were
of equal complexity. We have tried to document and explain the rise of this con-
sensus, as well as the reasons that have led to it being challenged in recent years.
Our conclusion is that a well-intentioned rejection of racial superiority moti-
vated the doctrine of equal complexity, and that it was important to linguists for
culturalpolitical reasons to maintain this doctrine over the long decades in which
racism was at its peak in both Europe and America. We are under no illusion that
racism has now disappeared but it has ceased to be mainstream. The result
has been that a younger generation of linguists experience the continued force of
the doctrine as perpetrating the very ideology it is meant to contest. For people
who have never thought in racist terms, the doctrine of equal complexity of lan-
guages appears antiscientific, an arbitrary refusal to countenance the development
of possible methods to measure the phenomenon by declaring its non-existence
in advance.
From that perspective, the doctrines demise would seem to be only a matter of
time. And yet, culturalpolitical forces can be very powerful, such that the passage
from being a received view, to a matter of debate, and on to the dustbin of outmod-
ed beliefs, takes decades at least, and sometimes centuries. It may even be reversed.
In the case at hand, it seems that Papa Boas knew best: the question of linguistic
complexity needs to be detached from any extrapolation to broader judgements
about the culture in which a given language is spoken. If that is agreed on, then the
potentially dangerous implications of the debate will have been defanged.
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Summary
Throughout most of the history of the discipline, linguists have had little hesitation in
comparing languages in terms of their relative complexity, whether or not they extrapo-
lated judgements of superiority or inferiority from such comparisons. By the mid 20th
century, however, a consensus had arisen that all languages were of equal complexity. This
paper documents and explains the rise of this consensus, as well as the reasons that have led
to it being challenged in recent years, from various directions, including language diversity,
as analysed by Daniel Everett; arguments about Creoles and Creoloids, as put forward by
Peter Trudgill, and others; and views from generative linguistics and evolutionary anthro-
pology.
Rsum
Pratiquement tout au long de lhistoire de la discipline, les linguistes nont gure eu
dhsitation comparer les langues en termes de complexit relative, quils aient ou non
tir des jugements de supriorit ou dinfriorit de telles comparaisons. Au milieu du XXe
sicle, cependant, un consensus est apparu sur le fait que toutes les langues taient dune
gale complexit. Cet article documente et explique lapparition de ce consensus, ainsi que
les raisons qui ont conduit sa remise en cause ces dernires annes, de plusieurs cts:
diversit linguistique, telle quanalyse par Daniel Everett; arguments sur les croles et les
crolides, tels quavancs par Peter Trugdill et dautres; vues manant de la linguistique
gnrative et de lanthropologie volutionniste.
Zusammenfassung
Die Sprachwissenschaftler hatten in der Vergangenheit kaum sonderliche Bedenken,
Sprachen hinsichtlich ihrer jeweiligen Komplexitt miteinander zu vergleichen, und dies
unabhngig von der Tatsache, ob sie daraus Schlsse auf die jeweilige berlegenheit
bzw. Unterlegenheit zogen. Um die Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts war schlielich eine Art
Konsens entstanden, alle Sprachen seien von gleicher Komplexitt. Die Entstehung die-
ser Auffassung wird in diesem Beitrag nachgezeichnet, aber gleichzeitig auch einsichtig
gemacht, wie sie in den letzten Jahren erneut infrage gestellt werden konnte, sei es unter
dem Gesichtspunkt der Sprachenvielfalt, wie ihn Daniel Everett darlegt, oder aufgrund
von Argumenten zu Kreolsprachen, die Peter Trudgill und andere vortragen, und nicht
zuletzt angesichts von Gesichtspunkten, welche von der Generativen Linguistik und der
Evolutionsanthropologie formuliert werden.
Authors addresses:
John E. Joseph Frederick J. Newmeyer
Linguistics & English Language 1068 Seymour St.
School of Philosophy, Psychology Vancouver, B.C.
& Language Sciences C anad a V6B 3M6
University of Edinburgh
e-mail: fjn@u.washington.edu
Edinburgh EH8 9AD
Un ite d Ki ngd om
e-mail:john.joseph@ed.ac.uk

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'All Languages Are Equally Complex'

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John E. Joseph and Frederick J. Newmeyer

Historiographia Linguistica XXXIX:2 (2012), 341368. doi 10.1075/hl.39.2.08jos

2. The idea of differential complexity

On the other hand, Schlegel continued, in languages which appear to be at

follower of Schlegels, Eugne Burnouf (18011852), introduced a historical per-

2.2 Differential complexity in popular opinion

3. The turn towards the idea of equal complexity

It is now standard for introductions to linguistics to make that same point.

plexity and detail there is no such thing as a primitive language. (Akmajian,

The abovementioned texts share a generative orientation. But many non-genera-

Finally, the assertion of equal complexity has appeared in a treatise on language

4. The arguments for equal complexity

As David Gil put it tersely (2001:326):

4.2 Language processing

The degree of Whitneys commitment to this proposition is debatable, however,

13. Optimality-theoretic phonology (Kager 1999) is a modern instantiation of Gabelentzs op-

Objective measurement is difficult, but impressionistically it would seem that the

4.3 Theory-internal considerations

5. Recent challenges to the equal complexity hypothesis

degree of complexity and the quite startling apparent differences in complexity

The question of complexity has resurged as a result of the current debate on

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