linguistic universals

n. Linguistic universals are facts that are true for all natural languages. Such universal properties are robust and are not necessarily driven by genetic relationships between languages. All languages build words by using consonants and vowels, and all languages have nouns and verbs which combine in sentences to form subjects and predicates. Such facts applicable to all languages are examples of absolute universals. Linguists have also studied implicational universals, tendencies that occur in many languages such that they could not plausibly be driven by chance. If a language has a three-vowel system, the three vowels are very likely to be /i a u/. If a language has subject- object-verb as its canonical word order, it is highly likely that it uses postpositions, rather than prepositions. Highly inflected languages, like Spanish, tend to have relatively free word order, while languages with more l imited functional morphology, like English, tend to have rigid word order requirements.

- EMF