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Philologists in 19th century were comparing languages their own
interests and they were doing it with great rigor.
The demand of the time was to find out ‘family’ for different
languages.
It was also desired to discover that a variety of languages spoken in
different parts of the world were actually member of the same
family or ONE ancient language.
All these attempts were greatly strengthened by the claim made by
a British government official in India, Sir William Jones about
Sanskrit in 1786.
The claim reads as :
• ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure;
• More perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more
delicately refined than either,
• yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of
verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident.
This observation by William Jones about Sanskrit brought a
revolution in the field of ‘Philology’ at that time.
They opined that a number of languages from very different
geographical areas must have some common ancestor.
It was clear, however, that this common ancestor could not be
described from any existing records.
They had to be hypothesized on the basis of similar features
existing in records of languages that were believed to be the offspring of this ancestor.
During this golden era of ‘Philology’ in 19th Century, a great term
came in existence i.e. ‘Proto’.
This term roughly meant ‘the original/beginning form of a
language.
This term came into use to describe that common ancestor which
could have been the mother of all the languages of the world.
It also incorporated the notion that this was the original form
(Proto) of a language that was the source of modern languages.
The modern languages for which the ancestor (Proto) has to be
found majorly came from Indian subcontinent (Indo) and from
Europe (European).
This incessant drive of the ‘Philologists’ made it possible to evolve
the great term in the 19th Century ‘Proto-Indo-European’.
Once this PIE is established as a “great-great grandmother,”
scholars set out to identify the branches of the Indo-European
family tree, tracing the lineage of many modern languages.
It is true that Indo-European language family is the largest LF with
the largest population and distribution in the world, but it isn’t the
only one.
There are about thirty such language families containing more than
6,000 different individual languages. We will come back to this
point again.
The family tree diagram in the next slide is a small and fleeting
view of Indo-European languages in their family branches.
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According to Ethnologue , there are about 6,912 languages in the
world.
Many of these languages are in danger of extinction while a few
are expanding.
In terms of number of speakers, Chinese has the most native
speakers (about 1.4 billion), while English (about 350 million native
speaker) is more widely used in different parts of the world (1.8
billion).
Language families
• The Indo-European language family
• Largest most wide-spread family
• Spoken on all continents
• Dominant in Europe, Russia, North and South
America, Australia, and parts of southwestern Asia
and India
• Subfamilies—Romance, Slavic, Germanic, Indic, Celtic,
and Iranian
• Subfamilies are divided into individual languages
• Seven Indo-European tongues are among the top 10
languages spoken in the world
• By comparing vocabularies in various languages one
can see the kinship
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Language families
• The Afro-Asiatic family
• Has two major divisions—Semitic and Hamitic
• Semitic covers the area from Tigris-Euphrates
valley westward through most of the north half of
Africa to the Atlantic coast
• Domain is large but consists of mostly sparsely
populated deserts
• Arabic is the most widespread Semitic language
• Arabic has the most number of native speakers—about
186 million
• Hebrew was a “dead” language used only in religious
ceremonies
• Today Hebrew is the official language of Israel
• Amharic a third major Semitic tongues has 20 million
speakers in the mountains of East Africa
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Language families
• The Afro-Asiatic family
• Has two major divisions—Semitic and Hamitic
• Very small number of people speak Hamitic
languages
• Share North and East Africa with Semitic speakers
• Spoken by the Arabs of Morocco and Algeria
• Spoken by the Tuareg of the Sahara and Cushitics of
East Africa
• Originated in Asia but today only spoken in Africa
• Expansion of Arabic decreased the area and number of
speakers
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Language families
• Africa south of the Sahara Desert is dominated
by the Niger-Congo family
• Spoken by about 200 million people
• Greater part of the Niger-Congo culture region
belongs to the Bantu subgroup
• Includes Swahili—the lingua franca of East Africa
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Language families
• Altaic language family
• Includes Turkic, Mongolic, and several other
subgroups
• Homeland lies largely in deserts, tundra, and
coniferous forests of northern and central Asia
• Uralic family
• Finnish and Hungarian are the two most important
tongues
• Both have official status in their countries
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Language families
• Austronesian language family
• Most remarkable language family in terms of
distribution
• Speakers live mainly on tropical islands
• Ranges from Madagascar, through Indonesia and
the Pacific Islands, to Hawaii and Easter Island
• Longitudinal span is more than half way around the
world
• Largest single language in this family is Indonesian
—5O million speakers
• Most widespread language is Polynesian
• http://maps-world.cn/map/world-map-political.jpg
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Language families
• Sino-Tibetan language family
• One of the major language families of the world
• Extends throughout most of China and Southeast
Asia
• Han Chinese is spoken in a variety of dialects as a
mother tongue by millions of people
• Han serves as the official form of speech in China
• Japanese/Korean language family
• Another major Asian family with nearly 200 million
speakers
• Seems to have some kinship to both the Altaic and
Austronesian
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Language families
• Austro-Asiatic language family
• Found in Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Thailand, and spoken by many tribes of Malaya
and parts of India
• Including India, the Austro-Asiatic family of
languages has always been marginalized
• And thus, it has occupied a remnant peripheral
domain
• Has been encroached upon by Sino-Tibetan, IndoEuropean, and Austronesian
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