Is there a mysterious ‘universal language’ which all human tongues contain hints of - and which defines how everyone speaks around the world?
Most linguists believe there isn’t - and that all languages evolved independently - but a new study has thrown that into question.
Cornell University researchers looked at words from 6,000 languages and found that for certain basic concepts, the sounds are often similar.
For instance, in words for nose, the word is more likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ and ‘oo’.
Other words for body parts - and for basic concepts such as ‘star’ and water’ also had associated sounds across many languages.
Researchers found that out of 100 words for basic concepts, 74 of them had sounds associated with them in up to 6,000 languages.
‘These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,’ said Dr Morten Christiansen of Cornell University.
‘There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there.’