The team studied nearly two-thirds of the world’s 6,000-plus languages using word lists covering about 100 shared basic concepts, checking to see if similar sounds kept cropping up. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to a long-held idea in linguistics and could complicate the work of researchers trying to trace the history and evolution of the world’s languages. “These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage,” said Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology at Cornell University. “There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don’t know what it is, but we know it's there,” added Mr. Christiansen, director of Cornell’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Sifting through two-thirds of the world’s languages, scientists have discovered a strange pattern: Words with the same meanings in different languages often seem to share the same sounds — even when those two languages are completely unrelated. For example, words for 'I' are unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l. 'You' is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.

The words included pronouns, body parts and properties like small and full, verbs that describe motion and nouns that describe natural phenomena like star and fish. Strong association 

 

 Not all, but “a considerable proportion of the 100 basic vocabulary words have a strong association with specific kinds of human speech sounds,” said the study. Of course, plenty of languages share words that have similar sounds because they’re either “descended” from the same original language (such as Spanish “hospital” and French “hopital,” both of which arose from Latin) or because they’ve borrowed heavily (as English did after the French invaded in the Norman Conquest of 1066). The word for tongue was “likely to have ‘l’ – as in ‘langue’ in French. The 100 words in the study include things like nose, tongue, leaf and sand. Certainly, you might find related words within a language that sound alike – think glance, glimmer and glare in English, which all have to do with vision and begin with a “gl.” But that doesn’t mean you’d find the same “gl-” cluster across other languages as well. Blasi’s study shows that some of those shared characteristics between “sister” languages may not be inherited from a “mother” language; instead, they could have arisen independently, simply because humans tend to like certain sounds with certain words.
Researchers from the Americas and Europe discover that sounds in 40–100 basic vocabulary words in around 3,700 languages are similar.