This explains why some aspects of English can be so hard to learn for speakers of other languages.
Is English “weird”? Many of us might feel this is true when we’re trying to explain the complex spelling rules of the language, or the meanings of idioms such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” to someone who is learning English. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task.
Their aim was to find out which languages had the largest number of features that differed most from other languages. In this survey, English came in 33rd position out of 239 languages. So it was definitely “weirder” than over 80% of the other languages in the survey. English has more phonemes than many languages, with around 44, depending on which variety of English you speak. It has an unusually large set of vowel sounds—there are around 11. According to WALS, most spoken languages only have between five to six vowel sounds. This is part of the reason that English spelling is fiendishly complicated, because it has inherited five letters for vowels from the Roman alphabet and speakers have to make them work for more than twice that number of sounds.
In a WALS survey of 955 languages, fewer than 2 percent of languages in the sample used English-like differences in sentence structure for questions. Over 50 percent of the languages added a question particle to differentiate a question from a statement.
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