English is not normal: No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language.

It's good to realize that your language is not the default, that the choices it makes are not uniquely logical and everything else is weird or counterintuitive. English speakers have an almost unique luxury in getting by almost anywhere in the world without learning a foreign language, and when they study one, it's typically another language from the same language family, like Spanish or French or German, which shares both structural similarities and lots of similar vocabulary. Therefore, it's easy to remain in a monolingual cucoon, or to take one step outside your front door and think you've gone on a thousand-mile journey.

That said, I think this article goes a bit too far in selling the weirdness of English. At first I thought this must be written by a layman, but it's not. John McWorther is a well-respected linguist. Very well. He knows far more about linguistics than I ever will. Nevertheless, I'll condescend to disagree with some of his takes, even knowing that he could probably school me on any number of topics. This is a popular article written for an audience of laymen, and scientists routinely go further than they could get away with in a formal paper in order to sell a narrative to a popular audience. For instance:

At this date there is no documented language on earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just this way.

Perhaps not, but isn't that an odd measure of oddness? There may be no other language that uses do in exactly the same way as English, but auxiliary verbs aren't uncommon. If you pick any language at random, you can probably find something that it does that isn't exactly replicated anywhere else.

I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm. Likewise, some languages plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his competence, only the masochist would choose Russian – unless he already happened to speak a language related to it.

Are there any studies that show that children learn Hebrew faster than Russian?

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

Afrikaans doesn't either, and it's an Indo-European language although not spoken in Europe. But more importantly, cross-linguistically, not having grammatical gender isn't odd. In this sample of 257 languages, more than half did not have grammatical gender. English may be the odd one out in its family, but isn't so odd globally.

It goes on like that. It's not that I have a counterexample ready for everything that is claimed unique about English - I'm sure he did his research better than I could do. It's more so that every language and language family has some uniqueness to it - English is not uniquely unique. Some oddities that are very rare or unique in other languages:

• Semitic roots only occur in Semitic languages (although even English has some forms of nonconcatenative morphology).
• Old Irish had a a fiendisly complex verbal system. Other languages have complex verbal systems, but the particular complexities are fairly unique.
• North Sámi has overlong preaspirated stops, which is as far as I know unheard of anywhere else (imagine a breath of air like a faint "H" before a p, t or k; then imagine holding that breath of air extra-long).
• A few languages, have singular, dual, trial and plural pronouns, an example being Tok Pisin: mi (I/me), mitupela (one other and I), mitripela (two others and I), mipela (more than two others, and I).
• Russian distinguishes determinate and indeterminate verbs of motion and this system interacts in complex ways with aspect and derivational morphology. (Walking there and back again, or every which way is xodit', or a derived form like sxodit'; walking one-way to a determinate location is idti.) It also has a very odd form of numeral agreement that could be summarized in English thus: One (masculine) rouble. Two, three, four rouble's. Five through ten roubles'. Yes, those apostrophes are no mistake: odin (1) rubl, dva (2) rublya (genitive singular), pyat' (5) rubley (genitive plural).
• Some Native American languages have an odd feature called "classificatory verbs/verbal forms". In Cherokee, you would use distinct verbal forms for giving someone an animate thing (like a cat), something liquid (like water), something flexible (like a shirt), something long (like a stick), and something compact (like a fruit). Some Wakashan languages of the Pacific Northwest of America go further and distinguish verbal forms for hollow objects, thin objects, flat objects, round and bulky objects, soft objects, dishlike objects etc.

Basically, every language and language family has something funky going on. It would do all of them a disservice to think that one is uniquely unique, especially special.