Language complexity is relative

The argument

Language complexity is relative. Another language's complexity depends on the learner's first language or languages, which means difficulty is never a property of the target language alone but of the distance between it and what the learner already knows. Any ranking of languages by difficulty is therefore incomplete unless it also names who is doing the learning. The examples make the dependence concrete. Russian may be a difficult language to learn for English speakers, since Russian speakers have to deal with more declensions than English speakers do, and a system of case marking that English largely lacks has to be acquired from nothing. Yet a Serbian speaker may find that Russian is much easier to learn than English, because Serbian and Russian may share cognates and belong to the same language family — the same grammatical machinery that defeats the English speaker is already familiar, and much of the vocabulary is recognisable on sight. The same language is thus hard and easy at once, depending only on where the learner starts. Furthermore, a study found that native Indonesian speakers learned English faster than they learned Mandarin Chinese, because English and Indonesian share a writing system in the Roman alphabet, so one of the largest initial obstacles was simply absent. There can be no objectively difficult language, because any explanation of such a language will come from the point of view of a language. This is the deeper version of the claim: the difficulty is not merely experienced from a starting point, it can only be described from one. Linguistic complexity, and explanations of linguistic complexity, are relative to whichever language the learner or linguist starts from, and there is no neutral vantage outside all languages from which the comparison could be made. Because every person uses a language as a starting point, they will approach each new language from the standpoint of their native language or languages — which is why all languages are complex, and complexity is relative.

Context

Several blogs and sites claim that languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese are the hardest languages to learn. Yet, are these languages objectively difficult, or are they only difficult for English speakers, who are likely reading the article in English?

Premises

Counter-arguments

While measuring linguistic complexity is difficult, some linguists have used criteria to systematically measure or rank linguistic complexity. A linguist can measure and compare language complexity between one another and rank which ones are objectively easier or more difficult. For example, linguist Michael Campbell used three aspects of difficulty to objectively measure across languages: 1) vocabulary acquisition, 2) syntax and morphology for fluency, and 3) phonology for fluency. This particular methodology found that Ubykh (an extinct Northwest Caucasian language spoken along the eastern coast of the Black Sea) was the hardest language to learn for anyone.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The relativity of difficulty for learners is well supported and concerns learning rather than complexity. A language can be harder in absolute terms while still being easier for speakers of a related one, and the premise runs the two properties together. [Rejecting P2] The standpoint objection proves too much. If no assessment can be made from outside some particular language, then no linguistic claim could be objective — including the claim that complexity is relative, which is itself made from within a language. [Rejecting C] Linguists have in fact proposed measures — inventory size, morphological inflection, phonemic and syntactic complexity — and applied them comparatively. Those measures are contested, but their existence shows the question is empirical rather than closed in advance by the impossibility the argument asserts.