The Greenbergian Universals

The Greenbergian universals are patterns in languages that tend to occur worldwide, regardless of specific language families or regions. Proposed by linguist Joseph Greenberg, these universals highlight features like common word orders or grammatical structures that many languages share. For example, many languages have a pattern where adjectives come before nouns or where questions often use words like "who" or "what" at the beginning. These patterns suggest there may be underlying principles in how human languages develop and operate, reflecting shared aspects of human cognition and communication rather than random variation.