Lectures 3/4

Languages of the World

[Note: these are lightly edited versions of overheads and notes used in class. They are provided in order to help you study, but they are not a substitute for coming to class and being prepared. The notes are incomplete, and will often be hard to make sense of if you were not in class.]

Outline: Languages of the World

1. Diversity of languages

2. Language grouping & language universals

3. Language death and revival

1. Diversity of Languages

Number of languages and numbers of speakers

World population:5.5 billion people

Number of languages spoken (estimated): 5000+ languages

However, you could speak to over halfof the world's population if you know just 8 languages!

some widely spoken Asian languages		some widely spoken European languages
Mandarin	864 mi	English	443 mi
Hindi	352 mi	Spanish	341 mi
Bengali	184 mi	Russian	293 mi
Japanese	125 mi	Portuguese	173 mi
	1525 mi		1250 mi

2. Language Grouping

Ways of grouping languages

1. Common history

2. Common sounds or grammar (typology)

a. Historical grouping

Similar Lexical Items ('cognates')

"Basic terms"

English	German	French
foot	Fuss	pied
hand	Hand	main
blood	Blut	sang
drink	trinken	boire
full	voll	plein
stone	Stein	pierre

Government & administration terms

English	German	French
government	Regierung	gouvernement
prince	Furst	prince
court	Hof	court
society	Gesellschaft	societé
pray	beten	prier
judge	Richter	juge

Accidental Similarity

Language A	Language B	English
ban	bhanem	'woman'
allaban	alnoba	'person'
lion-obhair	lhab	'netting
dun	odana	'town'
claden	kladen	'snowflake'
bata	pados	'boat'
cuithe	cuiche	'gorge'
monadh	monaden	'mountain'

Language A is Scots Gaelic (Scotland). Language B is Northeastern Algonquian (Maine). It is almost certain that these languages have never been in contact with one another.

Regular sound changes

Grimm's Law

Sanskrit	Latin	English
p	p	f
pitar	pater	father
pad	pes	foot
	piscis	fish
pasu	pecu	fee
t	t	th
trayas	tres	three
	pater	father
bhratar		brother

Indo-European 'p' --> Germanic 'f'

Indo-European 't' --> Germanic 'th'

Languages grouped by history: generally found in similar areas of world e.g.

Niger-Congo family (central Africa)

Austronesian (SE Asia, Madagascar)

but... English (N. America, Europe, S. Africa, Australasia)

b. Grammatical Grouping

Grouping by Phonology

1. Sounds

a. "Clicks": Bushman languages of Kalahari Desert (S. Africa), Damin secret language of N Australia

b. Front rounded vowels: NW Europe soeur 'sister' (French) müde 'tired' (German): includes Romance languages, Germanic languages, and Finnish, and excludes some German-speaking areas. i.e. doesn't follow historically defined set of languages.

2. Sound patterns, e.g. syllables CV CCVCC

Grouping by Morphology

Isolating languages:

one word, one form

Khi toi den nha ban toi, chung toi bat dau lam bai.

when I come house friend I, plural I begin do lesson.

'When I came to my friend's house, we began to do lessons.' (Vietnamese)

Inflecting languages:

prefixes, suffixes, stem changes express meanings

trink-en 'drink' (German) drink-1prs.plur.pres

sing-s (-3prs.sing.pres)

sang (-past)

Incorporating languages:

words built of many pieces: stems and inflections

anngyaghllangyugtuq

anngya- ghlla- ng- yug- tuq

boat- AUGMENT-acquire-want-3.sing

'He wants to acquire a big boat' (Siberian Yupik, Eskimo)

Grouping by Syntax

SVO The dog chased the cat (English, French, Thai)

SOV The dog the cat chased (Japanese, Eskimo, Turkish)

VSO Chased the dog the cat (Irish, Hebrew, Tagalog)

VOS Chased the cat the dog (Huave, Coeur d'Alene)

Syntactic Generalizations

"If a language has SOV word order, then auxiliary verbs follow the verb"

 

English: SVO John is running Lucie has left (i.e. verb follows auxiliary)

 

German, Japanese,Korean:

SOV basic word order, verb precedes auxiliary

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Section on Language Universals under construction

3. Language Death and Survival

Language Death

"The coming century will see the death or the doom of 90% of mankind's languages" Michael Krauss Alaskan Languages Center

 

Two-thirds of the world's languages have less than 10,000 speakers

Causes of language death

few speakers

no young speakers

low prestige for language

contact with other languages

Examples

Martuthunira (NW Australia): speakers killed off by exploitation and disease

Yiddish (Central Europe): speakers killed or dispersed by Holocaust

Faroese (North Atlantic): MTV causes language death??

Native American languages: influence of English

Language revival & creation

young speakers

increased prestige

lack of contact

Examples

Hebrew: creation of new territory

Nicaraguan Sign Language: no competing language for deaf in Nicaragua