>> English and the small set of other high-resource languages are in many ways
not representative of the world's other languages. Many resource-rich
languages belong to the Indo-European language family, are spoken mostly in
the Western world, and are morphologically poor, i.e. information is mostly
expressed syntactically, e.g. via a fixed word order and using multiple
separate words rather than through variation at the word level.

I thought I'd give an example of this for readers who don't speak many
languages other than English. My native language is Greek, which is an
Indo-European language, but it has some morphological intricacies that make it
more complicated to learn and use (as a second language and from what I'm told
of course) than English.

For example, in Greek, nouns have a gender [1]: masculine, feminine or neuter.
For instance, "the dog" is "ο σκύλος" ("the male dog") while "the cat" is "η
γάτα" (the female cat). However, grammmatical gender is not necessarily fixed
so one can also say "η σκύλα" ("the female dog") or "ο γάτος" ("the male
cat"). So there is a word-root ("σκυλ-" for dog, "γατ-" for cat) that is then
modified by a termination, typically -ος, -η -ο for the nominative of each
gender. The terminations change depending on the declention, for example the
genetive for "σκύλος" is "σκύλου" and the generative for "σκύλα" is "σκύλας",
etc. The termination also changes to denote number, singular or plural
(ancient Greek also used to have a dual number, used to refer to pairs of
nouns). Terminations vary depending on number according to gender and
declention. So for example the plural of "σκύλος" is "σκύλοι", genetive
"σκύλων" and the plural of "σκύλα" is "σκύλες", genetive "σκυλών".

Compare this with English where a dog is a dog is a dog, there is only one
plural form, "dogs" and there is only one genetive form "dog's" or "dogs'" for
each number. And a female dog is either a circumlocution, "female dog" or an
entirely new word, "bitch", with its own simple set of transformations for
number and genitive "bitches" and "bitch's" or "bitches'". Basically, changing
meaning in English can be represented by adding a few words to a vocabulary-
but changing meaning in Greek requires manipulating words at the structural
level.

There are probably a few counter-examples to the above but my understanding is
that this is how it works for the most part. And this, in particular the
abilty of English to represent more meanings with more words, might go some
way to explain why approaches that work best with large datasets tend to be
favoured in English NLP.

Edit: not an NLP expert or a linguist so corrections welcome, of course!

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[1] Other Indo-European languages also have genders but the interesting thing
is that those genders don't always match, between languages. This is an
endless source of confusion for foreign language learners. For example I speak
French from an early age and I only realised much later in life that Greek and
French do not always use the same gender for the same nouns, even though I'd
been using the right genders in my speech. For example, both "dog" and "cat"
are masculine in French: "le chien" and "le chat". But while I always used "le
chat" correctly, I always thought of it in my mind as "η γάτα", the feminine
Greek noun. Human language is weird!