My friend Cat and I looked throughout the WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures) and Ethnologue to determine whether languages got simpler as they increased in number of speakers. We defined “simpler” to mean “fewer rare features”, and counted a language as “widely spoken” if it was on the top 100 most spoken languages. We actually found a surprising amount of rare linguistic features that could be found in some of the world’s most common languages, like Mandarin and English.