“
Why are some languages quite regular and others not? The historical linguist Robert Hertzron, suggested that in the process of language acquisition, children tend spontaneously to over-regularize. They apply any rule they have acquired to all possible instances (in English, for instance, they may over-generalize the ordinary rule for past tense and say “he goed” instead of “he went”). In societies where adults correct children, these mistaken regularization are suppressed and irregularities are maintained; in societies where adults leave children alone in this respect, irregularities are less stable, and the language tends to be more regular. Gary Marcus et al. in their monograph on “Overregularization in language acquisition” (1992) quote Jill de Villiers half-joking: “Leave children alone and they’d tidy up the English language.” The view that children are the main source of language regularization is an old one. According to Max Müller, for instance, “It is likely… that the gradual disappearance of irregular declensions and conjugations is due, in literary as well as in illiterate language, to the dialect of children. The language of children is more regular than our own” [Müller 1890: 75].
