If you have ever spent much time around a toddler, you have likely heard them say things like, "I eated the cookie," or "We goed to the park yesterday." To a parent, these are adorable slips of the tongue that show a child is still learning how to talk. To a linguist, however, these moments are the "smoking gun" of a biological revolution. These small children are not failing to imitate their parents; they are actually trying to "fix" the English language. They are looking at the messy, chaotic pile of irregular verbs and random grammar rules we handed them and saying, "No thank you, I think I can make this more logical."
This process is called regularization, and it is the main engine that drives the evolution of human communication. While adults are usually happy to muddle through with dozens of exceptions to every rule, the young human brain is a pattern-seeking machine. When a child finds an inconsistency, their subconscious mind tries to smooth it out by applying a universal rule. If we multiply this effect by millions of children over thousands of years, we start to see why the languages we speak today look so different from the ancient tongues of our ancestors. Language is not a rigid stone statue; it is a living ecosystem that children are constantly weeding and pruning for clarity.
From the moment an infant begins to process the hum of voices around them, they are performing sophisticated statistical analysis. Scientists have discovered that babies as young as six months old are already tracking how often they hear certain sounds and how sentences are built. They are not just memorizing words as individual units; they are hunting for the underlying "code" that governs how those words fit together. This is a bottom-up biological drive, meaning it isn't something we teach them in school. Instead, it is a built-in setting of the human mind that demands order from chaos.
Adults are surprisingly comfortable with chaos. We use "is" for the present and "was" for the past, "bring" becomes "brought," and "think" becomes "thought." We navigate these irregular minefields using raw memory. Children, however, prefer "productive rules." Once a child realizes that adding "-ed" to a word usually means something happened in the past, they apply that rule with ruthless, democratic consistency. They create a "regular" version of every verb they meet. It takes years of social pressure and correction from adults to force a child to stop being logical and start being irregular like the rest of us.
The most dramatic evidence of this process does not come from the average living room, but from the history of "pidgin" languages. A pidgin forms when two or more groups who do not share a language are forced to communicate, often for trade or because of colonization. These pidgins are clunky and lack a formal grammar. They are essentially a "messy" linguistic bridge used by adults who are just trying to get a point across. However, something miraculous happens when the first generation of children is born into a community that speaks a pidgin.
Those children take the fragmented, inconsistent speech of their parents and spontaneously transform it into a "creole." A creole is a complete language with a consistent set of grammar rules, markers for time (tense), and sentence structures. The adults did not teach these rules to the children because the adults did not know them. The children's brains essentially filled in the blanks, inventing a systematic structure where none existed before. This proves that the human mind cannot tolerate a language without a pattern. If we do not give a child a rule, they will invent one for us.
If we look back at the history of English, we can see a clear trend: we are slowly but surely shedding our irregularities. Old English was a dense forest of complex endings, gendered nouns, and specific verb forms that changed based on who was speaking and when. Over the centuries, many of these complexities have withered away. This is not because we became "lazy" speakers, but because the passing of language from one generation to the next acts as a filter. Complexities that are too rare or too confusing for a child to learn easily tend to get smoothed over.
Consider the verb "to help." In Old English, the past tense was "holp." Over time, children hearing "helped" in other contexts began to apply the regular "-ed" ending to this verb as well. Eventually, the logical version won the battle, and "holp" vanished from common use. This same process is happening right now with verbs like "sneaked" (which is replacing "snuck") and "dived" (which is replacing "dove"). The more common a word is, the more likely the irregular version survives because children hear it often enough to memorize the exception. If a word is rare, the "rule" will eventually swallow the "exception."
| Feature | Old English (Complex/Messy) | Modern English (Regular/Simple) |
|---|---|---|
| Nouns | Used "cases" (word forms changed based on their role) | Mostly case-free (except for pronouns like he/him) |
| Genders | Nouns were masculine, feminine, or neuter | Nouns are gender-neutral |
| Verbs | Dozens of distinct "strong" verb classes | Most verbs follow the "add -ed" rule |
| Adjectives | Had to match the noun's gender and case | One form fits all nouns |
To understand why some irregular words survive while others die, we have to look at the tug-of-war between two different parts of the brain. On one side, we have the "mental lexicon," which is essentially a giant dictionary where we store memorized words like went, mice, and is. On the other side, we have the "procedural system," which handles the rules, such as "add -s for plural" or "add -ed for past tense." When a child speaks, these two systems compete. If the child can quickly pull the memorized word "saw" from their head, they will use it. If the memory fails, the rule-based system kicks in and produces "seed."
This explains why we still have irregular verbs at all. Frequently used words like be, have, and go are heard so often that they are burned into our memories from a very early age. They are reinforced every single day, making them "sticky." However, verbs that we only use occasionally are much more vulnerable to the regularization engine. If a child only hears a word once or twice a year, their brain is much more likely to forget the specific "irregular" version and simply apply the standard rule. In this way, frequency of use acts as a protective shield for linguistic weirdness.
One of the most persistent myths about language is that it is governed by "rules" handed down by experts, dictionaries, or teachers. We often feel that there is a "correct" way to speak and that any change is a sign of decline. However, the reality of regularization proves that language is a biological phenomenon that grows from the bottom up. Dictating how people should speak is like trying to tell a forest how to grow. No matter how many grammar books we write, the collective, subconscious choices of three-year-olds will ultimately determine what English looks like in five hundred years.
This realization shifts our perspective on "errors." When a child says "feets" instead of "feet," they are not being "wrong" in a biological sense; they are being hyper-correct. They have identified a successful rule of English (add -s for plural) and are applying it with more integrity than the language itself. By viewing language through this lens, we can see that "mistakes" are actually the seeds of future standards. Each time a child regularizes a verb, they make the language slightly more efficient and slightly easier for the next generation to learn.
It is tempting to think that as language becomes more regular and "simpler," it becomes less expressive. However, the opposite is often true. By smoothing out the clunky gears of grammar, we free up brainpower for more complex ideas, subtle meanings, and new vocabulary. Modern English may lack the twenty-plus case endings of its ancestors, but it has gained a massive, flexible vocabulary and a streamlined structure that allows for incredible precision in science, law, and literature.
Regularization is essentially a form of "data compression." Just as a computer shrinks a large file to make it easier to store and send, the child's brain compresses the messy data of human speech into a more manageable, rule-based system. This makes the language more "learnable." A language that was 100% irregular would be impossible to master, as every single word would require unique memorization. By leaning on rules, we allow our brains to generate an infinite number of sentences from a small set of principles.
As you move through your day, pay closer attention to how those around you speak, especially the youngest learners. When you hear a toddler say something "wrong," take a moment to appreciate the incredible biological machinery at work. They are not just mimicking sounds like a parrot; they are acting as architects, rebuilding the structure of human thought in real time. We are all part of a relay race spanning thousands of years, passing a torch of communication that is constantly being polished and refined by the very people who are just learning to hold it. The next time you see a "logical error" in speech, remember that you are witnessing the quiet, persistent evolution of the human mind, ensuring that our words stay as vibrant and adaptable as we are.
Linguistics & Languages
What you will learn in this nib : You’ll discover how kids reshape language by spotting patterns and turning irregular words into rules, why this drives the evolution of English, and how the brain’s built‑in drive for order creates new grammar from chaos.