1. a linguistic feature that is common to all known human languages, such as words, sentences, or (more specifically) a set of pronouns or a set of color words. Such substantive universals can be formulated on the basis of observations across multiple languages, yielding an empirically testable hypothesis that “all languages have X.”

2. in the linguistics of Noam Chomsky, a fundamental formal property that is built into the rule structure of all or nearly all language systems. An example is the rule observed by U.S. linguist Joseph H. Greenberg (1915–2001) that “In declarative sentences with nominal subject and object, the predominant order is almost always one in which the subject precedes the object.” Unlike substantive universals, these formal universals cannot be explained by universal features of human life or the physical environment. In Chomsky’s view, they constitute a universal grammar that is innate to human beings and inseparable from the language faculty itself. Also called linguistic universal; universal.