What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, constraints on cognition and usage, and language contact. The study used the Grambank database, which contains data on grammatical structures in over 2400 languages. The project was initiated by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in collaboration with a team of over a hundred linguists from around the world.