Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical patterns appear again and again. A new study by an international team led by Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland University) and Russell D. Gray (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) reveals that around a third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals” — patterns thought to hold across all languages — are statistically supported when examined with state-of-the-art evolutionary methods.