What is not universal?

[Squall]

These are things that I used to think that are universal.

• Some gestures - There are thousands of examples. Ex: The thumb up signal is offensive in some countries.
• Nasal vowels - My nat-lang has nasal vowels, but they are rare in natural languages. Consequently most of my conlangs have nasal vowels. (I misinterpret the pronunciation of English words that have nasal consonant after a vowel as nasal vowels.)
• Question intonation - The explanation about the interrogative is missing in most of my conlangs, because I thought that the intonation is enough to present a question. (I thought that the interrogative in English is one of the thousands of grammatical rules to annoy students. I did not know it is required to make the English speaker understand.)
• Intonation, pauses and variations - Many of these things are phonemic in some languages or work differently. In English, we know if the speaker has finished a sentence or has not. In Japanese, that feature is a mark that is part of the pronunciation of the word (pitch accent).

Can you present more examples of things that you or other people used to think that are universal, but actually are not?

[Dezinaa]

Nasal vowels - My nat-lang has nasal vowels, but they are rare in natural languages. Consequently most of my conlangs have nasal vowels. (I misinterpret the pronunciation of English words that have nasal consonant after a vowel as nasal vowels.)

Being a native English speaker, I find this one interesting. When I was little, I thought that French was the only language with nasal vowels, which were really just different ways of pronouncing syllable-final nasals. To me they still sometimes sound like a vowel + /ŋ/ or /ɴ/.

Can you present more examples of things that you or other people used to think that are universal, but actually are not?

I used to think /θ/ and /ð/ were very common. I also thought that all languages had "long vowels" like English's /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ/ vs. /eɪ i aɪ oʊ ju/, which I later discovered aren't really long vowels.

[qwed117]

I used to think /θ/ and /ð/ were very common. I also thought that all languages had "long vowels" like English's /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ/ vs. /eɪ i aɪ oʊ ju/, which I later discovered aren't really long vowels.

I have to agree so much. And it causes so many problems when I actually first wrote my conlang/conabugida. I wasn't able to understand the different vowels. I only subtracted vowels that I found unnecessary, or unwarranted. When I actually placed them in words from foreign languages, the words became garbled. Even English started to have the same problem, so I had to go back to the drawing board. I eventually got a couple more letters in, but they don't really make a difference as they are unused. One example is y as a half-vowel, trilled r as a half-vowel, and r as a half-vowel. None of these are used more than twice. Although that might be because I have only 10 lemmas. (My language is somewhat agglutinative, to my knowledge.)