Shared universal pressures in the evolution of human languages

Despite the great diversity of human languages, recurring grammatical patterns (termed ‘universals’) have been found. Using the Grambank database of more than 2,000 languages, spatiophylogenetic analyses reveal that while only a third of 191 putative universals have robust statistical support, there are still preferred feature configurations that have evolved repeatedly — consistent with shared cognitive and communicative pressures having shaped the evolutionary dynamics of languages.