Is there a language which uses 'passive voice' more often than 'active' one?

Question

Most languages I know of make use of 'active' more than 'passive'. It appears that the passive is derived from the 'canonical' active. Are there any languages that use more passive than active? Or can a language with only the passive form exist without a canonical active?

Answer 1

You clarified in a comment on another answer:

What I meant by more occurencs is the degree of tolerance in the usage. English, French, German allow freely verbs to passivize (with very few exceptions), as do Hebrew and Arabic, but Berber (my native) does not allow verbs to pasivize freely. I can say in statistical terms that only 26% of verbs are allowed to passivize. This is why I thought there might be another language that goes in the other direction, i.e. doesn't allow active occurence more often, and prioritizes the passive. This is why I raised the question.

And with this clarification, the answer is: yes!

Ancient Greek had three voices: active, middle, and passive. The middle and passive were identical in almost all forms, so I'm just going to refer to them as "mediopassive" here, even though there are some differences between them.

Unlike in English, all Ancient Greek verbs can take mediopassive forms—even the intransitive ones!

Sometimes this gives the verb a sense of "…for one's self", as in ᾄδ-ω "I sing" > ᾄδ-ομαι "I sing for my own benefit". Other times it emphasizes the subject's role, or has a different meaning altogether, like an idiom.

Other times, the verb has no active forms at all: it can only ever be mediopassive! For example, ἔρχ-ομαι means "I go", but there is no active *ἔρχ-ω.

Finally, some verbs can be either active or mediopassive in the present, but only mediopassive in the future, such as ἀκού-ω "I hear", ἀκού-ομαι "I am heard", ἀκού-σ-ομαι "I will hear".

In other words, Ancient Greek seems to prefer the mediopassive over the active, morphologically. I can't think of any verb that's actually forbidden to have mediopassive forms, while many verbs (the deponents and semi-deponents) can never be active.

Answer 2

Passive is not a universal feature of human languages. Indo-European languages have always had passive constructions, of one sort or another. It's used to allow different kinds of noun phrases to become subjects; to express different ways of describing something. Every language has this need. But this doesn't mean every language uses "active" and "passive" to fulfill it.

Even Indo-European languages can have more voices than active and passive. Sanskrit and Greek (and Proto-Indo-European) had three voices -- Active, Middle, and Passive -- which were distinct in use and meaning, and varied quite a lot from verb to verb. Many verbs had only passive or middle forms, with no active, or active and middle with no passive, etc.

Outside Indo-European, one finds ergative language families, like Mayan or Caucasian, which don't even have a concept of "subject" -- and therefore no concept of "passive", which relies on "subject". There is often a so-called "antipassive" construction in ergative languages, but the details vary.

Finally, in Austronesian languages, there is usually a three-way contrast between intransitive subject, transitive subject, and direct object, with a variety of rules, constructions, and affixes to swap one for another. Malagasy has six or seven constructions called "passive" that promote various kinds of noun phrases to subject position in different contexts.