In a new research, scientists have discovered a "universal language" that involves words that pertain to similar concepts and have almost similar sounds. The universal language was found after an analysis of thousands of languages spoken around the world.
The new study, which involved the analysis of almost 4,000 languages, is challenging the fundamental concepts of linguistics; how sound and meaning are only linked together by chance.
An international team of researchers consisting of linguists, physicists, and computer scientists studied 100 words taken from almost two-thirds of the existing 6,000 languages spoken globally today.
Their findings revealed that there is a clear statistical relationship of concepts or objects and the sounds that people often use to describe them.
For example, the word for body parts like "nose" often consists of "neh" or "oo" and the word for "tongue" often has the letter "l" in many languages.
Another is the word "leaf," which is most likely to include the letters a, b, p, and l."Sand" will often include an s, and lastly, words that mean "red" and "round" often have the letter r.
There are also words that avoid certain letters, such as words beginning with "l," which avoid the letters a, u, b, r, s, t.
According to Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab's Morton H. Christiansen, the study revealed sound symbolic patterns in numerous languages around the world.
Why do these words have sounds that are similar to each other? These signals might help children acquire language. It might also have something to do with the human brain, human interactions, and social skills during the process of learning language, Christiansen said.
This new study has been published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.