WRLD 302 / Godwin-Jones
Unit 7: Language / Presentation 3
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How many languages are there?
•  There are roughly 6,700 languages spoken on this planet.
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•  96% of them are spoken by a mere 4% of the world’s
population
The distribution of the world languages
•  2,200 languages in Asia
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•  2,060 languages in Africa
•  1,300 languages in the Pacific
•  1,000 languages in the Americas
•  230 languages in Europe
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Countries with the greatest number of languages?
Papua-New Guinea
832
Indonesia
731
Nigeria
515
India
400
Mexico
295
Cameroon
286
Australia
268
Brazil
234
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Half of the world’s languages are spoken in only eight
countries
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Papua New Guinea
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Papua New Guinea
•  Why so many languages?
•  In many ways very basic way of life, but advanced language
•  Field linguist: Planning on studying the language for 20
years
•  Verb system incredibly complex
•  Importance of story telling because no written language
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Top 15 languages
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countries
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Papua New Guinea
WRLD 302 / 6Godwin-Jones
Papua New Guinea
Unit 7: Language / Presentation 3
•  Why so many languages?
•  In many ways very basic way of life, but advanced language
•  Field linguist: Planning on studying the language for 20
years
•  Verb system incredibly complex
•  Importance of story telling because no written language
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Top 15 languages
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Language classification systems
•  Typological classification system organizes languages
according to the similarities and differences in their
structures
–  For example word-order based versus inflection based
•  Genetic classification system divides languages into families
on the basis of their historical development
–  Language families
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Language Types
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Language Families
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The Indo-European Family
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Language Families
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Germanic languages
•  Germanic vs. other Indo-European languages
–  Pater/Père => Father/Vater
–  Grimm’s Law: changes about 2000 years ago
•  Scandinavian languages
–  Danish, Norwegian, Swedish: mutually comprehensible
–  Icelandic: little has changed since Middle Ages
–  Finnish: not Germanic or even Indo-European
•  Uralic language family (Hungarian, Estonian)
•  Heavily inflected, 14 cases!
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Celtic languages
•  Scots-Gaelic
•  Irish
•  Welsh
•  Threatened:
–  Cornish
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–  Icelandic: little has changed since Middle Ages
–  Finnish: not Germanic or even Indo-European
•  Uralic language family (Hungarian, Estonian)
WRLD 302 / Godwin-Jones
Unit 7: Language / Presentation 3
•  Heavily inflected, 14 cases!
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Celtic languages
•  Scots-Gaelic
•  Irish
•  Welsh
•  Threatened:
–  Cornish
–  Manx
–  Breton
•  Characteristics: Consonant heavy, verb first
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Other IE sub-families & languages
•  Romance -French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian,
and some minor languages: Provencal (in southern France),
Catalan, Sardinian, Rhaeto-Romance, Ladino (spoken by
Sephardic Jews)
•  Slavic-Three branches. East: Russian, Byelorussian,
Ukrainian. West: Polish, Sorbian (a tiny group in Germany)
Czech, Slovak. South: Serbian, Croatian, Slovene,
Bulgarian, Macedonian
•  Baltic-Lithuanian, Latvian; the closest relatives of the Slavic
group; in contrast to most other modern Indo-European
languages, the Baltic languages have changed very little.
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Other IE sub-families & languages
•  Greek-Modern Greek has changed greatly from ancient
Greek.
•  Armenian- Spoken by several million people north of Turkey
and Iran.
•  Iranian-Dozens of languages spoken by millions in Iran and
Afghanistan; include Farsi (modern Persian), Pashto,
Kurdish.
•  IE languages of India-Dozens of languages descended from
ancient Sanskrit; include Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi; now
spoken by over a billion people.
•  Romanyi – language of the Roma/Stini (Gypsies)
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Non-Indo-European languages in Europe
•  Basque- The sole surviving relic of western Europe's preIndo-European past.
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•  Armenian- Spoken by several million people north of Turkey
and Iran.
•  Iranian-Dozens of languages spoken by millions in Iran and
WRLD 302 / Godwin-Jones
Unit 7: Language / Presentation 3
Afghanistan; include Farsi (modern Persian), Pashto,
Kurdish.
•  IE languages of India-Dozens of languages descended from
ancient Sanskrit; include Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi; now
spoken by over a billion people.
•  Romanyi – language of the Roma/Stini (Gypsies)
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Non-Indo-European languages in Europe
•  Basque- The sole surviving relic of western Europe's preIndo-European past.
•  Hungarian-Distantly related to Finnish; spoken by
descendants of North Asian invaders from the ninth century
AD. Several non-IE peoples invaded Europe after the fall of
Rome, but only the Hungarians stayed and preserved their
language.
•  Georgian-a language isolate spoken by a few million people
north of Turkey.
•  Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew are important non IndoEuropean of Southwest Asia.
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Other Language Families
•  Altaic
–  Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek
•  Niger-Congo
–  Swahili, Wolof, Yoroba, Zulu, Xhosa
•  Semitic
–  Arabic, Hebrew
•  Sino-Tibetan
–  Mandarin:
•  No gender, no plurals, no conjugation, no declension
•  But dichotomy between spoken & written language
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Other Language Families
•  Austro-Asiatic
–  Cambodian, Vietnamese
•  Austronesian
–  Malay, Tagalog, Polynesian languages
•  Australian Aboriginal
–  Warlpiri
•  Eskimo-Aleutian
–  Yupik, Inuit, Aleut
•  Amerindian or Native American
–  Mayan, Mohawk Sioux
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The Warlpiri: How different?
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•  Austro-Asiatic
–  Cambodian, Vietnamese
•  Austronesian
WRLD 302 / Godwin-Jones
–  Malay, Tagalog, Polynesian languages Unit 7: Language / Presentation 3
•  Australian Aboriginal
–  Warlpiri
•  Eskimo-Aleutian
–  Yupik, Inuit, Aleut
•  Amerindian or Native American
–  Mayan, Mohawk Sioux
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The Warlpiri: How different?
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The Warlpiri: How different?
•  Indigenous Australian language
•  Spoken by aboriginal people in central Australia
•  Language very important to culture, traditionally nomad
•  Isolated from other non-indigenous languages for some
60,000 years
•  Heavily inflected, suffixes added to build long words
•  Word order variable
•  Not primitive!
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Endangered Languages
•  Biodiversity vital to human survival
•  How about cultural diversity?
•  Cultural knowledge bound to language
•  Nearly half of world’s languages threatened
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Endangered Languages
•  What we lose
–  Ancient cultures with spoken traditions & stories
–  Knowledge of the natural world
•  Impact of globalization?
–  Role of English
–  Role of social media
•  How could technology help?
–  NPR story:
–  Digital Technologies Give Dying Languages New Life
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Revived Languages
•  Hebrew
–  Extinct as a spoken language for 2 millenia
•  Cornish, Manx
–  Close to extinction
•  Hawaiian
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–  Role of social media
•  How could technology help?
–  NPR story:
WRLD 302 / Godwin-Jones
Unit 7: Language / Presentation 3
–  Digital Technologies Give Dying Languages
New Life
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Revived Languages
•  Hebrew
–  Extinct as a spoken language for 2 millenia
•  Cornish, Manx
–  Close to extinction
•  Hawaiian
–  Continuously spoken on one island
•  Artificial Languages
–  Esperanto
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Alternative versions of a language
•  Dialects – versions of a language with distinctive vocabulary,
grammar and pronunciation that are spoken by particular
groups of people
•  Accents – distinguishable marks of pronunciation
•  Jargon – a set of words/terms that are shared by those with
a common profession or experience
•  Pidgin– a simplified language that develops as a means of
communication between two or more groups that do not
have a language in common
•  Creole– full-fledged language that originated from a pidgin
or combination of other languages, often originated in
plantations
•  Code switching – the selection of the language to be used in
a particular interaction by multilingual individuals
•  Lingua franca – common language used by speakers of
different languages
•  Register – is a variety of a language used for a particular
purpose or in a particular social setting
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