From Quora:
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Pidgin: languages which often form when groups without a common language interact tend to drastically simplify the grammar and lexicon of the contributing “parent” languages.
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Modern English has enormously simpler morphology than Old English, which was perhaps in large part driven by contact and use by non-native speakers of English. Compare this to the Icelandic language which has mostly been spoken by an isolated and homogeneous community. Icelandic has been much more conservative in its morphology and Germanic-derived lexicon, which is today a lot like Old English (not surprising since they share a common Germanic ancestor).
For a long time, I would have agreed with André Müller’s answer about all languages being of similar complexity: some might be more morphologically complex, some might be more phonologically complex, some might be more syntactically complex, but overall things seem to balance out — and the ability of human children to learn all natural languages is a pretty interesting piece of evidence for this.
However, I no longer subscribe to this view; I’m much more in agreement with Marc Ettlinger’s answer that complexity varies wildly across languages and is influenced by many sociolinguistic and historical factors such as language contact. One of the most important and thought-provoking books I’ve read on language complexity is John McWhorter’s What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be). I discussed this book in more detail in my answer to another question.
I agree with this. The nutty line in Linguistics is the PC line, “All languages are equally complex.” If you disagree with this line, they go nuts and virtually try to hound you out of the profession as an idiot or a heretic. It is nice to know that there are some PhD linguists who disagree – Ettinger got his from Berkeley!
Obviously Tsez is more complex than Malay.
Duh.
I have long thought that languages decrease in complexity over time and certainly as they become the commerce of a complex society.
The most complex languages are often spoken by the most primitive peoples. When I was in school, one of my professors told me that primitive people are often intelligent (as they are humans like us), but there is not a lot of intellectual stimulation around, so they are bored. Their languages are often fiendishly complex, and these people often spend their time experimenting with playing brain games with their complex languages by speaking in such a way as to emphasize the complex aspects of the language. So every day becomes a sort of a recreational IQ test for some fellow bored out of his head in the jungle.
Another question is whether these primitive people deliberately created these languages in their complex style because they were bored and wanted some intellectual challenge. I haven’t the faintest idea if that is true or not. I got roundly trashed as an idiot for saying this over at Reddit Bad Linguistics (where they hate me), but I got it from one of my PhD professors.
Do we know that primitive people like their complex languages as a form of intellectual stimulation? We do not, but it is a good hypothesis, and the idiots at Bad Linguistics haven’t proven it wrong yet so at the very least it’s inconclusive.
In fact, it is bordering on heresy in Linguistics to even say that primitive languages tend to be more complex that those of more modern peoples, but intuitively it seems to be the case.
For one thing as society gets complicated and industrialized, it helps to be able to communicate what you want to say as quickly as possible with the least amount of misinterpretation. After all, time is money. So perhaps this may be one reason why I believe languages become more complex with increasing development of society.
The suggestion from the answer by Lenski that languages become less complex over time may not be the case. Perhaps it is only a side effect of increased cultural modernization and increased number of speakers and contacts with other languages.
