"Angloexceptionalism" really gets on my nerves to no end, and the worst part of it is that it seems it's mainly anglophone monolinguals that are making these outrageous claims, like English being intrinsically superior to other languages or being exceptionally easy to learn. Sure, English is really damn useful, but the grand scheme of things it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian.
As a Hungarian speaker who also knows other languages, I think there is indeed a difference. To construct even quite basic sentences in Hungarian you have to learn much more rules than to do the same for English. At a basic level English feels like just putting words next to one another. I mean basics like "I go in the house. You eat dinner." To say these in Hungarian as a beginner you'd have to either rote learn stuff or prepare to work through lots of rules and tables.
In my experience English tends to be more "forgiving" and robust to non native mistakes for basic communication and the time to one's first fully correct sentence (self made) is shorter.
I'll admit my ignorance of the grammatical complexities of Hungarian beyond the fact that it's highly declined and has a really interesting case system, though I will remark that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity. (This isn't necessarily an established, of course, as complexity is something that will likely never be fully quantified).
Ultimately though, learning languages is kind of a paradox in the sense it's both fairly easy and extremely difficult at the same time.
> the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity
That doesn't mean the complexity has to be evenly distributed along the learner's path.
Also, I'm not saying one is better than the other. But it's certainly something people experience. When I learned German, it took longer to craft correct sentences because there are more rules to pay attention to. You have to get the cases and its interactions with the genders right in every sentence for example. Same with conjugations. There is no "simple subset" of the language where you can avoid this. While there is a simple English that you can resort to and use almost perfectly with little study.
To build even a simple Hungarian sentence you need to understand vowel harmony, definite and indefinite conjugation, nuanced word order rules etc.
Also regarding this:
> the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity
It's very hard to quantify as you say and I don't think they'd be able to say otherwise even if it was otherwise due to fear of misinterpretation (i.e. they'd be accused of racism).
"that the modern lingustics community generally ascribes to the theory that all languages are equal in complexity."
I would love to see a citation for this.
It is easy to prove that an artificial language such as Esperanto has lower learning complexity than other languages. All you have to do is count the concepts a student has to learn.
With the thousands of languages out there, I would be surprised that all of them have equal concept count - I would think it would follow a normal distribution of some sort and that there are outliers at both ends.
This is something I happen to know a bit about, since a while ago I had a long conversation about this on a conlanging forum [0]. Unfortunately, I can give you no citation for this — quite the reverse! In fact, the general consensus seems to be that languages are not at all equally complex. My understanding is that statements to that effect are usually considered to be effectively a ‘lie-to-children’: not wrong as such, but certainly over-simplified. As Mark Rosenfelder says so eloquently in the linked thread:
> [Saying that this statement is wrong] … seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand why Linguistics 101 books say things like this. … It's because non-linguists are obsessed with which languages are better than others, and complexity is part of that. They want to hear that French is more logical, Italian is more beautiful, Arabic is God's language, Phrygian is the first language, etc, etc. They want to hear that the standard languages are better than dialects. They want to hear that primitive cultures speak primitive languages … linguistics professors all run into it and get tired of it and throw in some stuff to combat the myths.
Also, some linguists have put forward examples of genuinely simpler languages. Most famously, David Gil has suggested that Riau Indonesian is fundamentally simpler than other languages [1], but I’m sure there’s other examples.
That being said, I have a dissenting opinion: I think the vast majority of languages are indeed at about the same level of complexity (with exceptional cases like Riau Indonesian and creoles). Again, you can find some intensive discussion of my claim in the linked thread, but basically, my claim is that a lack of sophistication in one part of the grammar tends to be balanced by increased complexity in another part. e.g. Turkish has lots of suffixes making its verbs very complicated; English doesn’t have this, but compensates by using lots of auxiliary verbs with intricate rules for ordering and combining. Kalam only has about 200 verbs in total, but compensates with detailed rules for combining those verbs to give different shades of meaning. And so on and so forth.
> it's no more fit to be the global lingua franca than say Mandarin or Hungarian.
Sounds like an outrageous claim done by a monolingual ;)
These are the languages with the biggest barriers (tonal + alphabet in the case of Mandarin and weird case system in the case of Hungarian).
So no, those are the worse examples you could have picked. French could work, or maybe Japanese with a romanicized alphabet could work.
Heck, pick Latin, simplify the declensions, simplify the spelling towards ecclesiastical pronounciation and you might end up with something close to Italian.
Grammatical complexity, in my opinion is overhyped as a barrier to language learning. In my own experience, after enough time and pratice you eventually internalize grammar structures without a problem. The real issue is learning enough vocabularly to express yourself not simply fluently, but eloquently, and to be able to make it through any text you find.
Also, a few problems in your argument against Mandarin: tone really isn't a barrier. The writing system, which is not an alphabet, would actually present difficulties, but I wouldn't consider it an intrinsic part of the language - it could be changed. Writing English isn't much better, but similar complaints could be made for French.
(It should be noted that Manadarin morphology, on the otherhand, seems to discourage borrowing words, and most things are imported as calques. This could be viewed as a either good thing or a bad thing.)
Languages, in general, are around the same level of complexity. We can make comparisons and say that English inflection is massively simpler than Hungarian's , but we shouldn't concluded based on that assessment that English is simpler than Hungarian, but that this complexity is simply distributed differently.
English has a lot of relative benefits: it's closely related to a lot of widely spoken languages. And a lot of people speak it. It's not even close, even as a speaker of Spanish, which has more native speakers than English, it feels like a Sisphysian effort to find content that's just as high quality as I have been accostumed to in English, and inn any type of quantity. But none of these advantages are intrinsic to English.
My central thesis, after all, isn't that Mandarin or Hungarian, or even as easy to learn for most of the (IE speaking) world. It's that the supposed advantages of English aren't its grammar, and that English isn't a superior language by any means. History, not lingusitics, has allowed English to enjoy as much widespread diffusion and prestige as it does today.
It's a nice thesis but I disagree. Yes, the complexity of English is distributed in other places rather than in an exaggerated number of cases or multiple verbal conjugations.
But it is still easier than Mandarin or Hungarian (especially for speakers of PIE originated languages ;) ).
If you have languages that have "standardized teaching" you'll see that it takes a much longer time to go from A to B level in German than in French for example. See this (scroll down) https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/language-difficulty/
Note that this difficulty is "kinda" reciprocal (not 100% because English is easy to a German speaker but not vice versa), you could have a different index for native Chinese speakers for example, but I'd bet English would be one of the easiest even then.
Sure, English has historical advantages, before that it was French and then Latin and people dealt with those in some way, so you have a point (access to a language plays much more on the ability to learn than grammar for sure).
It's not easier to learn because of grammar or vocab, but simply due to network effects. If you want to learn it, whoever you are, and wherever you live and whatever your mother tongue is there is the highest possible chance on average that you can access people who speak English, find high quality reference materials, and find native media that interests you.
If you run those considerations through all possible language pairs it's easy to see that these are the main factors that influence difficulty. Grammar, vocab, and pronunciation are a distant second.
That was the point I was trying to get at, that liguistically there's nothing "special" about English, as many people, as you can see in this thread, would claim. That's not to say there isn't a huge disparity between English and pretty much ever other language on the face of this earth, but we can ascribe it all to factors of history rather than any lingusitic factor. Once you establish a lingua franca, it tends to self-reinforce its position.
I disagree. I think English does have some inherent advantages. I can't say it's the "best", but it's certainly better than some alternatives.
There are some specific things that make it "easier" to learn: Latin alphabet with no accents, no genders, small conjugation tables, few tenses, very "relaxed" grammar. In this way English is a subset of rules already understood by other speakers.
What also needs to be mentioned, though, is its expressiveness. There are many objectively "easier" languages than English. For example: Afrikaans has a very simple grammar, being essentially a "stripped" Dutch; Spanish has a much smaller vocabulary. But all humans talk about the same things one way or another. A language being "simpler" means there must be other ways to communicate those more complex things. It's often done using very specific and nuanced rules based on context and culture.
English, on the other hand, can be mostly learnt in a book. There's not much culture to learn as English culture has already been exported widely around the world. You're much less likely to end up in a situation where you have no idea at all how to express yourself using the rules you've learnt.
There are definitely accents in English. They are just not written down which makes written English very confusing as nothing written has proper prononciation rules.
