Languages can seem gloriously untidy. Words change meaning, forms become irregular & historical accidents pile up over centuries. Yet when linguists zoom out, recurring patterns begin to emerge. What appears chaotic at first glance often reflects deeper pressures shaping how languages evolve.
One of the most intriguing patterns concerns the relationship between forms & meanings. Related meanings often end up linked to similar forms. Think of how magic, magician & magical are clearly connected. Or how one word can carry several related meanings, such as head referring to a body part, a leader or the front of a queue. Linguists have long been interested in why such connections emerge so reliably across languages.
A recent study by Thomas Brochhagen, Xixian Liao, Jamie D. Wright & Carmen Saldana, published in Nature Human Behaviour, explores this question on a remarkable scale. Rather than focusing on a handful of languages, the researchers examined form-meaning relationships across more than 1,900 languages worldwide.
The Study
One well-known tendency in language is that related meanings are often expressed by the same word. Linguists call this colexification.
For example, many languages use a single word for concepts that English keeps separate. In Russian, ruka can refer to both a hand & an arm. In other languages, the same word may cover both tree & wood, treating the living plant and the material it produces as closely related ideas. Unrelated concepts, by contrast, are much less likely to share a word.
The researchers wanted to know whether the same principles also operate below the word level. In other words, do languages show similar regularities in the way meaningful word parts are reused?
To investigate this, they analysed large cross-linguistic databases covering more than 1,900 languages. They compared patterns both:
- at the word level (whole words sharing meanings)
- at the subword level (meaningful components recurring across different words)
They then modelled the forces that might explain these patterns across languages.
The Findings
The researchers found that regularity exists both at the word level & below it.
Some meanings are systematically grouped together through shared words, while others are connected through recurring word parts. Interestingly, the specific meanings involved often differ across the two levels.
However, the underlying explanation appears to be the same.
Languages seem to balance two competing pressures:
- Lexical compression: reusing forms for related meanings makes language easier to learn, store & process.
- Lexical differentiation: keeping forms distinct prevents misunderstanding & ambiguity.
In essence, language is constantly negotiating between efficiency & clarity.
The analysis suggests that many patterns in vocabulary are not arbitrary historical accidents. Instead, they emerge from this ongoing tension between making communication economical while keeping meanings distinguishable.
A simple example comes from English. We can easily see the relationship between teach, teacher & teaching. Reusing form helps learners recognise connections. Yet we would struggle if completely unrelated concepts repeatedly shared the same forms, because communication would become far less precise.
The authors argue that this balance helps explain regularities both within words & across entire lexical systems.
Why This Is Interesting For ELT
This is not a classroom intervention study, so it doesn’t generate direct teaching techniques.
What makes it fascinating for language educators is that it highlights something learners often discover intuitively: vocabulary systems are not completely arbitrary.
Word families, derivational patterns, semantic networks & recurring morphemes may reflect deeper organisational pressures that operate across human languages.
Research in cognitive linguistics has long argued that learners benefit when they see vocabulary as a network rather than as isolated items. This study adds large-scale cross-linguistic evidence suggesting that language itself may be organised around exactly those kinds of meaningful connections.
Teacher Takeaways?
- Vocabulary is often more systematic than it first appears. Highlighting word families & meaning relationships may help learners notice underlying structure.
- Morphology matters. Prefixes, suffixes & recurring word parts are not merely spelling features but can reveal how languages organise meaning.
- When learners spot patterns between words, they may be discovering principles that operate across hundreds of languages rather than making random associations.
Language is often described as arbitrary. Yet studies like this suggest that languages may be surprisingly efficient systems, constantly balancing the need to save effort with the need to avoid confusion.
If languages evolve independently across the world, why do so many end up creating similar patterns between forms & meanings?
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