Languages of the World William R. Leben Stanford University

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1 August 2016 Preliminary draft for Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics Languages of the World William R. Leben Stanford University Summary About 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today. The actual number depends on where the line is drawn between language and dialect an arbitrary decision because languages are always in flux. But specialists applying a reasonably uniform criterion across the globe count well over 2,000 languages in Asia and Africa, while Europe has just shy of 300. In between are the Pacific region, with over 1,300 languages, and the Americas, with just over 1,000. Languages spoken natively by over a million speakers number around 250, but the vast majority have very few speakers. Something like half are thought likely to disappear over the next few decades, as speakers of endangered languages turn to more widely spoken ones. The languages of the world are grouped into 430 language families, based on their origin, as determined by comparing similarities among languages and deducing how they evolved from earlier ones. As with languages, there s quite a lot of disagreement about the number of language families, reflecting our inability to know for sure how closely one group of languages is related to another, due to our meager knowledge of many present-day languages and even sparser knowledge of their history. The figure 430 comes from Glottolog.org, which actually lists them all. While the world s language families may well go back to a smaller number of original languages, even to a single mother tongue, scholars disagree on how far back current methods permit us to trace the history of languages. While it is normal for languages to borrow from other languages, occasionally a totally new language is created by mixing elements of two distinct languages to such a degree that we would not want to identify one of the source languages as the mother tongue. This is what led to the development of Media Lengua, a language of Ecuador formed through contact among speakers of Spanish and speakers of Quechua. In this language practically all the word stems are from Spanish, while all of the endings are from Quechua. Just a handful of languages have come into being in this way, but less extreme forms of language mixture has resulted in over a hundred pidgins and creoles currently spoken in many parts of the world. Most arose during Europe s colonial era, when European colonists used their language to communicate with local inhabitants, who in turn blended vocabulary from the European language with grammar largely from their native language. Also among the languages of the world are about 300 sign languages used mainly in communicating with the deaf. The structure of sign languages typically has little historical connection to the structure of nearby spoken languages. Some languages have been constructed expressly, often by a single individual, to meet communication demands among speakers with no common language. Esperanto, designed to serve as a universal language and used as a second language by some two million, according to

2 2 some estimates, is the prime example, but it is only one among several hundred would-be international auxiliary languages. This essay surveys the languages of the world continent by continent, ending with descriptions of sign languages and of pidgins and creoles. Each section ends with a set of references. The main source for data on language classification, numbers of languages, and speakers is the nineteenth edition of Ethnologue ( except where a different source is cited. KEYWORDS: languages, language family, language history, language classification, sign language, pidgin, creole 1. Europe 1.1 Indo-European Most of Europe s languages belong to the Indo-European family, which has the following branches: Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, and Tocharian Celtic Celtic, which extended across much of Europe as far east as present-day Turkey 2,000 years ago, has undergone gradual contraction since the ascendance of the Romans in Europe, and with the spread of English and French the Celtic languages are now confined to parts of Britain, Ireland, and western France. The two main branches of modern Celtic are Brythonic and Goidelic. In the Brythonic branch are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton; the Goidelic branch includes Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. Gaulish, a third branch, went extinct but has recently undergone restoration attempts, as have Manx and Cornish, which also were extinct. In fact, all present-day Celtic languages have seem revitalization efforts. This is happening even with Welsh hardly an endangered language with 562,000 speakers in the 2011 census. Currently, Wales has school programs aimed at getting a greater proportion of ethnic Welsh, who number nearly 2,400,000, to learn to speak the language. The same is happening with Breton, spoken by over 200,000 in Brittany in northwestern France, but no longer exclusively predominately, or even commonly used by the population in any city, town, or village in Brittany, according to Adkins (2013). As in Wales, school programs in Brittany since at least the 1970 s have aimed to get young people speaking a variety of their ethnic tongue Germanic Germanic s two branches, North and West, were once grouped into a superbranch called Northwest Germanic, once paired with the Gothic branch that went extinct, largely in the Middle Ages, though isolated traces of Crimean Gothic remained until the late eighteenth century. The North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. West Germanic includes English, German, and Dutch. Each of these is paired with a sister language that is also spoken by significant numbers. English is paired with Western Frisian, Dutch with Afrkaans, and German with Yiddish.

3 Italic This is the ancestral branch of the modern Romance languages, all descended from a colloquial form of Latin. About 2500 years ago, the Italic branch included not just Latin but also Oscan, Umbrian, and Faliscan, but these languages have no modern descendants. The modern descendants of Latin include French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Sardinian, Romansch, Ladin, Friulian, Occitan, and Judeo-Spanish Greek and Albanian Modern Greek is the only descendant of this branch, also called Hellenic. Albanian, too, is the only descendant of the Albanian branch Balto-Slavic This group has Baltic and Slavic subbranches. The official languages of Baltic countries Lithuania and Latvia make up the Baltic subbranch. Slavic has three divisions: Eastern (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian), Southern (Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian), and Western (Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian) Indo-Iranian The languages of this branch are spoken in Asia. See section Armenian Like Greek and Albanian, the Armenian branch has just one language, with a major division between Eastern and Western dialects. The standard language of Armenia is in the Eastern Armenian group, which also includes the dialects of Armenian communities in Iran, Russia, Georgia, and their environs. Texts from Armenian Cilicia from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries CE are the first to show a differentiated Western dialect. Many dialects of Western Armenian were obliterated by the Armenian genocide, but the Western Armenian standard and its dialects are found in Turkey (especially Istanbul), the Levant, and émigré communities in the West. Armenian is of special interest to linguists because of retentions from Indo-European, notably all seven of its noun cases and the irregular retention of initial laryngeals Anatolian and Tocharian Both of these branches are long extinct. Anatolian s disappearance is linked to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The Tocharian branch became extinct with the expansion of Turkic Uyghur tribes in the ninth century CE. Tocharian manuscripts from a few centuries prior to extinction, uncovered in the early twentieth century, provided information that led scholars to reassess key assumptions about Proto-Indo-European and its descendants. Anatolian manuscripts from a much earlier era, about two millennia prior, similarly reshaped what had been known. Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1990) offer a highly readable synthesis and summary of research presented in Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1996). 1.2 Uralic Three important languages in this family are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. These three were once grouped into a branch called Finno-Ugric. But while Finnish and Estonian are closely related members of the Finnic branch of Uralic, Hungarian is a separate Uralic entry,

4 4 and Finno-Ugric is no longer regarded as a branch. The remaining languages of Uralic are small languages spoken in northern parts of Europe and Asia. One branch, Sami, has ten small languages, each one a variant of Saami. By far the largest is Lule Saami (pejoratively called Lapp), with close to 2,000 speakers, mostly in Sweden. 1.3 Caucasus area The area of the Caucasus Mountains and its environs between the Caspian and Black Seas includes Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and parts of neighboring countries. This relatively small region is known for its thirty-nine highly diverse languages, which fall into three families, Nakh-Dagestanian, Abkhazo-Adyghean, and Kartvelian. The most important Nakh-Dagestanian language is Chechen. Abkhaz-Adyghean is made up of Abkhaz and Adyge and is best known among linguists for systems with sixty or more contrasting consonants but very few vowels. The major Kartvelian language is Georgian, with four million speakers. Ethnologue combines Nakho-Dagestanian and Abkhaz-Adyghean into a single family, North Caucasian. Nakho-Dagestanian Abkhaz-Adyghean are also known by the respective names Northwest (or simply West) Caucasian and Northeast (or East) Caucasian. 1.4 Basque Basque is an isolate spoken in the Western Pyrenees by about a million, some in France but most in Spain. Its history is widely thought to go back several millennia, antedating the more recent Indo-European migrations to the region. There have attempts to identify Basque with a wide variety of groups, including Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, and Iberian, but without attracting much support. Recent DNA evidence reinforces the notion of Basque descent from an ancient population of farmers and hunters (Günther et al. 2015). 1.5 Turkish Turkish, a language of Europe and Asia, belongs to the Turkic group, described in the section on Asia. 1.6 References Adkins, M. (2013). Will the real Breton please stand up? Language revitalization and the problem of authentic language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2016(223): Gamkrelidze, T. V., & Ivanov, V. V. (1990). The early history of Indo-European languages. Scientific American, 262(3): Gamkrelidze, T. V., & Ivanov, V. V. (1995). Indo-European and Indo-Europeans: A reconstruction and historical analysis of a proto-language and proto-culture. Part 1: Text. English version by Johanna Nichols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Günther, T., Valdiosera, C., Malmström, H., Ureña, I., Rodriguez-Varela, R., Sverrisdóttir, Ó. O., & de Castro, J. M. B. (2015). Ancient genomes link early farmers from Atapuerca in Spain to modern-day Basques. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(38),

5 5 2. Africa Africa s extraordinary linguistic diversity is threatened by the possible extinction of half or more of its languages, as some predict by the end of the century due to competition from other languages. The current count exceeds 2,000 languages, grouped into just a few families. The most revolutionary aspects of Greenberg s (1955, 1963) classification of African language families largely stand today, though with many adjustments by later experts in the different languages. Many other questions still remain open. For example, Greenberg recognized Khoisan as a family, but today s scholars tend to set a higher bar for establishing genetic relationships, leading many to defer judgment on whether this truly is a family. The unity of Nilo-Saharan is occasionally called into question, but the detailed comparative work of Bender ) and Ehret (2001) has gained this family wide acceptance as a valid genetic unit. Niger-Congo and Afro- Asiatic remain uncontested as genetic units. For Afro-Asiatic, there are debates about subgrouping. For example, do Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic together form a separate branch, as Bender 1997 contends? Within Cushitic, Greenberg s classification included Omotic, which many now regard as a distinct branch, while Glottolog fails to recognize Omotic as an established group at all. Within Niger-Congo, there are a number of unanswered questions, many revolving around the constituency of its most complex branch, Benue-Congo, which uncontroversially includes all the Bantu languages and many more. Among the changes, the Kwa languages are now reduced to what Greenberg called Western Kwa, and the remaining languages have been moved from Greenberg s Kwa into distinct branches, including Yoruboid as a major example. Ijoid is quite possibly not in Benue-Congo, where Greenberg placed it, but is instead a sister branch. For details and references, see Bendor- Samuel & Hartell (1989) and the references in Nordhoff et al. (2013). 2.1 Afro-Asiatic This is the northernmost family, with 376 languages spanning all of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as two smaller areas of sub-saharan Africa. The six branches of Afro-Asiatic are Semitic, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, and Egyptian. The Semitic branch has seventy-eight languages, including Arabic, the first language of up to 300 million throughout North Africa and widely spoken in the Middle East. Among the world s languages, Arabic ranks fourth in the number of speakers. Other important Semitic languages are Hebrew, which shares official status in Israel with Arabic, and several Ethiopic languages. Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia and the first language of 21 million, is a South Ethiopic language. In the North Ethiopic branch is Tigrigna, an official language of Eritrea spoken by 7 million. The term Afro-Asiatic was used by Joseph Greenberg to replace the designation Hamito-Semitic, which posited a division between the Semitic branch (named for Biblical figure Shem) and a putative branch named for Biblical figure Ham. The notion that Hamitic languages formed a unified branch seemingly reflected factors like speakers typical occupations and a lighter skin color than black Africans to the south. Greenberg argued that extraneous factors like these had no place in language classification, which should be based solely on linguistic data. Comparing languages from the different groups classed as Hamitic, Greenberg concluded that the evidence did not support their grouping into a single branch.

6 6 The Berber branch of Afro-Asiatic is spoken in the foothills of the Atlas Mountain in Morocco and Algeria and, spottily, in neighboring countries. Cushitic gets its name from Cush, the son of Ham. The forty-five languages of this group are spoken mainly in Ethiopia and Somalia, with a few in Kenya and Tanzania. Chadic languages are mainly spoken in the countries surrounding Lake Chad and are dominant in northern Nigeria, numbering close to 200 in all. By far the most widely spoken is Hausa, with twenty-five million native speakers. The thirty-one languages of the Omotic branch are all spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Egyptian branch, thanks to hieroglyphs, can be traced back before 3,000 B.C. Ancient Egyptian was the ancestor of Coptic, spoken in Egypt but over time was replaced by Arabic until Coptic died out, roughly 400 years ago. Since then Coptic has survived as a liturgical language. 2.2 Nilo-Saharan The 205 languages of the Nilo-Saharan family occupy a band extending from the Sahara desert to the Nile region. For a relatively small family, they are quite diverse typologically, and as already noted, some doubt whether the Nilotic and Saharan branches really deserve to be grouped into a family. Reflecting this, Glottolog divides them into two separate families, Nilotic and Saharan. 2.3 Niger-Congo The great majority of languages in sub-saharan languages are members of the Niger-Congo family. Its 1,538 languages make it the world s largest language family, and only the Indo- European and Sino-Tibetan language families have more speakers than Niger-Congo. Ideas about the respective genetic affiliations of well-known groups within Niger-Congo have changed substantially over the last half-century. This has been the case with Kwa, Mande, Gur, Atlantic, and Benue-Congo, among others. To date, the truly remarkable event in the classification of this family remains Greenberg s ( ) demonstration that Bantu a group of 538 languages covering most of Central and Southern Africa, was, along with other languages called Bantoid, a subgroup within a group now called East Benue-Congo, most of whose other languages are spoken in Nigeria and Cameroon. This discovery which took ten years before gaining the wide acceptance it has today not only challenged earlier assumptions about linguistic classification but also open the door to hypotheses about Bantu origins. The currently accepted view is that Bantu originated in southeastern Nigeria and expanded east and south from there. 2.4 Khoisan Among the languages of the world, some are poorly studied and go back so far in time that it is hard to trace their genetic origins. This is the case with Khoisan, which is generally not recognized as an established family but as a set of twenty-seven languages some with just a handful of speakers that are likely not to belong to the other three established families of African languages. Ermisch (2008) presents what is known, along with the residual problems. 2.5 Austronesian Off the southeastern coast of Africa is the island of Madagascar, home to Malagasy, a Malayo- Polynesian language brought over by the island s earliest settlers over 2,000 years ago. For more on Malayo-Polynesian, see the section on Austronesian in the section on Oceania.

7 7 2.6 References Bender, M. L. (1996-7). Nilo-Saharan languages: An essay in classification. (Lincom Handbooks in Linguistics). Munich: Lincom Europa. Bendor-Samuel, J. T., & Hartell, R. L. (1989). The Niger-Congo languages: A classification and description of Africa's largest language family. University Press of America. Ehret, C. (2001). A historical-comparative reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. Ermisch, S. (Ed.) (2008). Khoisan languages and linguistics: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium, January 8 12, Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. Greenberg, J. H. (1955). Studies in African language classification. New Haven, CT: Compass. Greenberg, J. H. (1963). The languages of Africa. The Hague: Mouton. Nordhoff, S., Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., & Haspelmath, M. (Eds.) (2013). Benue Congo. Glottolog. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. (Accessed online at on 8/4/20164.) 3. Asia Asia is home to 60% of the world s population and nearly 30% of the world s languages. These group into just a handful of major families, leaving out several important isolates, and due to long periods of contact, there s less diversity than one might expect. The downside is that the contact situation has made it difficult to classify genetic relationships with certainty in some important cases. And it s worth mentioning some areal features for various subregions: 3.1 Indo-Iranian Indo-Iranian is not a family but a branch of Indo-European, whose other branches were listed in the section on Europe. Among Indo-Iranian languages, Hindi and Urdu are official languages of India & Pakistan, respectively, and many consider them dialects of a single language. Kachru s 2008 linguistic sketch describes Hindi and Urdu as closely related, mentioning the special case of Hindustani, an essentially colloquial language that has been called a co-dialect of Hindi and Urdu. Hindustani is the language once promoted by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress as a tool of national unity. For the Hindustani controversy, see Kachru 2008). 3.2 Turkic The forty-one languages of this family extend from Macedonia to Siberia, Central Asia, and western China. Despite the vastness of this area, the languages themselves are typologically quite similar: agglutinative, with vowel harmony involving both backness and rounding.

8 8 3.3 Mongolic The thirteen Mongolic languages are spoken in Mongolia and in adjacent areas of the Russian Federation and China. Mongolian, with over six million speakers, is by far the largest language in the family and the official language both of Mongolia and of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China. 3.4 Tungusic The eleven languages of this family are scattered through Siberia, the Far East of Russia, and northwestern, but most are endangered and some are nearly extinct. That includes Manchu, the language of the founders of the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China for nearly three centuries up to The 2016 edition of Ethnologue lists only twenty speakers for Manchu, though over ten million are ethnically Manchu. 3.5 Altaic area The Altaic area extends from Turkey across the Altai Mountain area of Central and East Asia to Siberia. Altaic has been regarded by some as a family comprising Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, and for a few even including as distant members Japonic, Korean, and Ainu. Versions of the Altaic hypothesis still have adherents, among them Miller (1991) and Georg et al. (1999). But this notion has been cast into increasing doubt as criteria have been challenged and evidence has been rejected as based largely on shared typological similarities, a position summarized in Unger (1990). The more conservative consensus is that many resemblances among languages in this linguistic area could have come from language contact rather than a shared ancestor. This view is reflected in Ethnologue and Glottolog, among others. The Altaic hypothesis has inspired a good deal of writing. Here is some relevant work on various sides of the question: Georg, S., Michalove, P. A., Manaster Ramer, A, & Sidwell, J. (1999). Telling general linguists about Altaic. Journal of Linguistics 35: Greenberg, J. H. (2002). Indo-European and its closest relatives: The Eurasiatic language family, vol. 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greenberg, J. H. (2000). Indo-European and its closest relatives: The Eurasiatic language family, vol. 1: Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greenberg, J. H. (1997). Does Altaic exist? In: I. Hegedus, P.A. Michalove, & A. Manaster Ramer (Eds.), Indo-European, Nostratic and beyond: A festschrift for Vitaly V. Shevoroshkin, (pp ). Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. Reprinted in J. H. Greenberg (2005). Genetic Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp ). Johanson, L., & Robbeets, M. (Eds.). (2010). Transeurasian verbal morphology in a comparative perspective: Genealogy, contact, chance. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

9 9 Miller, R. A. (1991). Genetic connections among the Altaic languages. In: S. M. Lamb and E. D. Mitchell (Eds.), Sprung from some common source: Investigations into the prehistory of languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Starostin, S. A. (1991). Altajskaja problema i proisxoždenie japonskogo jazyka. (The Altaic problem and the origin of the Japanese language. Moscow: Nauka. Starostin, S. A. (2005). Response to Stefan Georg's review of the Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages." Diachronica 22(2): Starostin, S. A., Dybo Anna V., & Mudrak, O. A. (2003). Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages, 3 volumes. Leiden: Brill. Unger, J. M. 1990). Summary report of the Altaic panel. In: P. Baldi (Ed.) Linguistic change and reconstruction methodology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 3.6 Dravidian Dravidian languages are spoken primarily in southern India, though some are also found further north in the Indian subcontinent. The major literary languages are Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu, each one the first language of tens of millions. We are able to trace the history of Dravidian better than for many other language families due to a long literary periods of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu. Questions have been raised about Dravidian similarities to Uralic and Altaic, among several others. Austerlitz (1971) dismissed these, and Krishnamurti (2003), briefly surveying archeological and DNA literature along with linguistic evidence in his foundational work on Dravidian, seconds the conclusion that the linguistic arguments behind the proposed genetic relationships are tenuous and speculative. For Dravidian morphology and word order, Krishnamurti s (2003: 6) brief statement captures the basic pattern: mostly agglutinative in type, but without the elaborate chains of affixes found in, say, Turkish. Some languages have also developed a number of fusional traits. The word order is relatively fixed, usually SOV. Some Dravidian languages exhibit a three-way contrast in coronal stops: dental, alveolar, and retroflex. Dravidian is the likely source of the retroflex consonants of Sanskrit. 3.7 Sino-Tibetan The languages of this family are spoken in China, the Himalayas, and Burma. The division into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman branches is customary, as espoused by Matisoff (2003), though a few experts, including van Driem (2007), still question the grouping of Sinitic as a separate sister branch to Tibeto-Burman, along with many particulars. Tibeto-Burman, with 441 languages, is especially problematic because of the inaccessibility of many of its languages in the Himalayas, not to mention that van Driem (2015: 141) finds them endangered with imminent

10 10 extinction. Overall, the lower-level groupings within Tibeto-Burman are more certain than the higher-level ones, leading van Driem (2001) to posit a Fallen Leaves model that recognizes clumps of closely related languages without identifying where on the family tree they fell from. Still, Ethnologue offers a full family tree. Sino-Tibetan was at one time thought to include languages farther south, such as the Tai-Kadai languages and the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages, but the similarities among these languages are probably better attributed to areal diffusion, including massive lexical borrowing from Chinese Chinese Member languages of the Chinese (or Sinitic) branch are sometimes called dialects, especially in China, but this stretches the normal meaning of the term dialect too far, since the fourteen languages that make up Chinese are far from mutually intelligible, even though they share the same writing system and many grammatical properties. Each of the fourteen Chinese languages of course has dialects. Ethnologue lists five major dialects for Mandarin (which also goes by the name Guanhua): Huabei Guanhua (Northern Mandarin), Xibei Guanhua (Northwestern Mandarin), Xinan Guanhua (Southwestern Mandarin), Jinghuai Guanhua (Eastern Mandarin, Jiangxia Guanhua (Lower Yangtze Mandarin). Other sources divide the dialects differently, due not only to differences of linguistic and geographical criteria but also to centuries of diffusion of linguistic features. For discussion, see Kurpaska (2010) and Yan (2006). With over a billion speakers total, Mandarin s dialects have many subdialects as well. Linguistic diffusion is the general pattern in the historical development of Chinese, due to over a dozen massive population movements going back to the seventh century BCE and continuing to the present, each migration involving hundreds of thousands and often millions of people. Complicating these scenarios is the fact that in most cases, the migrations were to areas already settled by speakers of Chinese or other languages, often resulting in language mixture. The history of these migrations and their linguistic effects is traced by LaPolla (2001) Tibeto-Burman As already noted, most of the 441 languages of this branch are endangered. As a group, they have many linguistic traits in common, including SOV order and agglutinative verb structure. Two word order exceptions are the Karenic languages (Myanmar) and Bai (China), which have the SOV order characteristic of Sinitic, though unlike Sinitic, Karen and Bai are also relatively agglutinative. Karen and Bai both stand out enough from the rest of Tibeto-Burman to inspire attempts to classify them outside of Tibeto-Burman proper. Benedict s (1976) proposed sister to Sinitic, labeled Tibeto-Karenic, with Tibeto-Burman as a daughter, has been ruled out, while more recently several scholars have taken up the case for linking Bai with Sinitic. See Wang (2005) for a brief survey with references. 3.8 Austro-Asiatic The Austro-Asiatic family extends across south Asia from India to Vietnam. The Munda branch is found in Northeastern India, surrounded by Indo-European and Dravidian languages which have influenced them greatly over the ages. Typologically they are agglutinative, with SOV word order. The Munda languages are typologically very different from the other major branch of Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer, which includes two important

11 11 national languages, Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian). Vietnamese has borrowed massively from Chinese and was originally written with Chinese characters. Some of the languages, notably Vietnamese, have developed phonological tones, and others are thought to be in the process of developing them. 3.9 Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) and Tai-Kadai These two families were once regarded as branches of Sino-Tibetan, and the languages of both families show many influences from Chinese. The Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages are spoken in scattered areas across southern China and nearby countries of Southeast Asia. The Tai Kadai languages extend from China south to Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam and include the national languages Thai and Lao. Both families share a number of typological traits: most of their languages are SVO with isolating morphology and contrastive tone that is associated with creaky or breathy voice quality Paleosiberian area The name Paleosiberian applies to a set of four families of languages of Siberia. They have no established genetic relationship but share a few typological features agglutinative word structure and, with exceptions, SOV word order. Ket, an isolate in Central Siberia with 210 speakers, is unlike the rest of Paleosiberian in several respects. It is tonal and has a highly agglutinative verbal system with complex agreement patterns features that make it look like Na-Dene in North America. The case for a genetic relationship between the two has been made by Vajda (2010, 2011). For arguments pro and con, see Kari & Potter (2010), Campbell (2011) and Kiparsky (2014: 65-67). Implications of this finding for Beringian migrations are pursued by Sicoli & Holton (2014) Korean and Japanese Two of the major languages of East Asia, Korean and Japanese, are widely considered isolates, or nearly so in the case of Japanese, by far the dominant language in Japonic, a family of twelve languages. Some versions of the Altaic hypothesis include Korean and Japanese in a family with Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. Another isolate of Asia is Burushaski (northeastern Pakistan) References Austerlitz, R. (1971). Long-range comparisons of Tamil and Dravidian with other language. In: R. E. Asher (Ed.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies. Vol. 2. (pp ). Madras: Association of Tamil Research. Benedict, P. K. (1976). Sino-Tibetan: Another look. Journal of the American Oriental Society 96(2):

12 12 Bhatia, T. K. (1987). A history of the Hindi grammatical tradition: Hindi-Hindustani grammar, grammarians, history, and problems. Vol. 4. Leiden: Brill. Campbell, Lyle. (2011). Review of The Dene-Yeniseian connection (Kari and Potter). International Journal of American Linguistics 77: ). Kachru, Y. (2008). Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani. In: B. B. Kachru, Y. Kachru, & S.N.Sridhar (Eds), Language in South Asia (pp ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiparsky, P. (2014). New perspectives in historical linguistics. In: C. Bowern & B. Evans (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics (pp ). New York: Routledge. Krishnamurti, B. (2003). The Dravidian languages. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kurpaska, M. (2010). Chinese language(s): A look through the prism of the great dictionary of modern Chinese dialects. Vol Berlin: de Gruyter. LaPolla, R. J. (2001). The role of migration and language contact in the development of the Sino- Tibetan language family. In: A. Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon (Eds.), Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: Case studies in language change (pp ). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matisoff, J. A. (1991). Sino-Tibetan linguistics: Present state and future prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology 20: Matisoff, J. A. (2003). Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and philosophy of Sino- Tibetan reconstruction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pawley, A. (2009). Greenberg's Indo-Pacific hypothesis: An assessment. In B. Evans (Ed.), Discovering history through language: Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross (pp ). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Rai, A. (1984). A house divided: The origin and development of Hindi/Hindavi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ratliff, Martha S. (2010). Hmong-Mien language history. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Sicoli, M. A., & Holton, G. (2014) Linguistic phylogenies support back-migration from Beringia to Asia." PoS ONE 9.3: e Thurgood, G, & LaPolla, R. J. (Eds.). (2003). The Sino-Tibetan languages. London: Routledge. Ting Pang-Hsin [Ding Bangxin], & Hóngkai Sun. (2000). Hàn-Zàngyu yánjiu de lìshi huígù [Retrospective history of Sino-Tibetan studies]. Hàn- Zàngyu tóngyuáncí yánjiu, 1. [Cognate words in Sino-Tibetan languages], 1). Nanning: Guangxi Mínzú Chubanshè [Guangxi Nationalities Press].

13 13 Vajda, E. J. (2010). Siberian Link with Na-Dene Languages. In: J. Kari & B. Potter (Eds.). Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska. (New series, Special issue) 5.1: Vajda, E. J. (2011). A response to Campbell. International Journal of American Linguistics 77: van Driem, G. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the Greater Himalayan region, containing an introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language (2 vols.). Leiden: Brill. van Driem, G. (2015). Tibeto-Burman. In W. S-Y. Wang & C. Sun (Eds.) The Oxford handbook of Chinese linguistics (pp ). New York: Oxford University Press. Wang, Feng. (2005). On the genetic position of the Bai language. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 34(1): Wurm, S. A. (1982). The Papuan Languages of Oceania. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Yan, M. M. (2006). Introduction to Chinese dialectology. Cologne: Lincom Europa. 4. Oceania Oceania, which includes Australia and most of the island territories of the central and southern Pacific and Indian oceans, is home to the Austronesian family and to two very large language groups, the Australian and the Papuan groups. 4.1 Austronesian The languages of this family are distributed across Oceania from Madagascar to the Pacific Islands and total well over 350 million speakers. All but twenty-five of these languages are Malayo-Polynesian; the rest are aboriginal languages of Taiwan. The dominant category, Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, has well over half of the languages classified as Malayo-Polynesian but only a few million speakers total and is not generally accepted as a valid linguistic grouping. The remaining Malayo-Polynesian languages are found in seventeen smaller groups, some of whose languages are widely spoken and highly important politically. Among these are: -Javanese, the language of nearly 90 million, centered in Java, Indonesia -Filipino, an official language of the Philippines used by close to 50 million, including L2 speakers, as the national language of Philippines. The variety associated with native speakers, who number over 20 million, is called Tagalog. -Sundanese, the language of about 34 million in Java -Malay, the official language of Malaysia (along with Mandarin and English) and widely spoken in Indonesia as well, is the first language of close to 50 million. -Malagasy, spoken by 18 million

14 14 Blust (2013) offers a recent and comprehensive account of the linguistic and anthropological aspects of this family, including internal linguistic groupings, the linguistic structure of its languages, sociolinguistic considerations, and archeological evidence backing up the linguistic groupings. Adelaar & Himmelmann (2005) cover a similar range of topics. 4.2 Papuan languages Estimates run to as many as a thousand languages in an area about a quarter of the size of India, making New Guinea the most linguistically diverse region in the world (Foley 2000: 357). Major groupings have been proposed by Greenberg (1971), Wurm (1982), and Ross (2005). Greenberg put all the languages into a single family and included some others from outside New Guinea, but the evidence for this has not generally been deemed credible. Wurm (1975) posited ten Papuan phyla plus isolates, based entirely on lexicostatistic and typological evidence that others found unconvincing (Foley 1986). A more recent grouping by Ross (2005), based essentially on evidence from pronouns, has also failed to find wide acceptance. One is left for now with Foley s (1986) classification, with several dozen families and a similar number of isolates. Correlated with this is extreme typological variation across the families, with morphological types ranging from isolating to polysynthetic. Foley s Papuan families average about twenty-five members in size, with the exception of Trans-New Guinea, with 482 member languages in Ethnologue, a figure that experts agree is subject to much revision because the family s boundaries with others remain unclear. The uncertainty is reflected in Glottalog, which lists only Nuclear Trans New Guinea, with 315 languages. 4.3 Australia This continent has been inhabited for 50,000 years, but the time frame for language classification is limited to just the last 5,000 or so. As a result, we know very little about the historical connections among Australia s languages. Worse, the number of vigorous Aboriginal languages today is a fraction of what it was before Europeans settled there in the eighteenth century. Of the 250-odd languages of Australia in 1788, more than half are extinct, and of the remainder, fewer than two dozen are used and learned by the youngest generation. Beginning with Hale (1966), many sources divide the continent s original languages into two groups, Pama-Nynngan and Non-Pama-Nynngan, but even this rudimentary grouping is complicated by large-scale phonological and grammatical diffusion. Dixon, author of many standard reference works on Australian languages, among them Dixon (2002), diverges from the others by simply dividing the languages into fifty groups representing different areas, though among them some genetic clusters may be found. For Dixon, Pama-Nyungan cannot be supported as a genetic group. Nor is it a useful typological grouping. (Dixon 2002: 53). The problem with applying standard methods toward reconstructing a language tree for Australia, as Dixon sees it, is that Australia is unique, in part to due widespread diffusion, whereby a language will tend to become more like its neighbors (Dixon 2002: 448). For alternative studies from a vantage point that differs markedly, see Bowern & Koch (2004). Phonologically, Australian languages tend to be simple in some ways usually with three-vowel systems and complex in others with as many as four contrasting articulations among the coronal consonants. Morphologically, Pama-Nyungan languages have non class systems and verbal concord prefixes, and some have extensive noun incorporation constructions. Outside

15 15 Pama-Nyungan, morphology is of a more simple agglutinative type, with suffixes but no prefixes. Most Australian languages have split ergativity, a common pattern being ergativeabsolutive alignment for nouns but nominative-accusative alignment for pronouns. Word order tends to be very free, but there is evidence that clauses are best analyzed as verb-final; see Mushin & Baker (2008). 4.4 References Adelaar, K. A., & Himmelmann, N. (2005). The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar. Routledge Language Family Series. New York: Routledge. Blust, Robert. The Austronesian languages. Asia-Pacific Linguistics, (2013). Bowern, C., & H. Koch. (Eds.) (2004). Australian languages: Classification and the comparative method. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dixon, R. M. W. (2002). Australian languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foley, W. A. (1986). The Papuan languages of New Guinea. Cambridge University Press. Foley, W. A. (2000). The languages of New Guinea. Annual review of Anthropology 29: Greenberg, J. H. (1971). The Indo-Pacific hypothesis. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Current trends in linguistics. Vol. 8 (pp ). The Hague: Mouton. Hale, K. L. (1966). The Paman group of the Pama-Nyungan phylic family. Appendix to G. N. O Grady, C. F. Voegelin, & F. M. Voegelin, Languages of the world: Indo-Pacific. Fascicle 6. Anthropological Linguistics 8.2: Mushin, I., & Baker, B. (Eds.) (2008). Discourse and grammar in Australian languages. Vol Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ross, Malcolm. (2005). Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages. In A. Pawley, R. Attenborough, & R. Hide, & J. Golson (Eds.), Papuan pasts: Cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples (pp ). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Wurm, Stephen A. (1982). Papuan languages of Oceania. Tübingen: Narr. 5. The Americas The past and present states of indigenous languages in the Americas are entirely different as a result of colonization by Europeans. North America is estimated to have been host at one time to nearly 300 distinct languages (Mithun 1999: 1). Since then, over a hundred have gone extinct, and practically all of the rest are endangered. The 2010 U.S. Census Bureau report found 169 Native North American languages to be spoken in the home, with a total speaking population of less than half a million. By far the largest is Navajo, with nearly 170,000. In second and third place with roughly 19,000 each are Yupik and Dakota.

16 16 Central and South America are home to a few much larger languages, spoken by several million. Still, language endangerment is also the rule there. Of perhaps 1,700 pre-columbian languages, fewer than 700 remain (Campbell 1997) and of these most are spoken by populations of several thousand or fewer. The languages of the Americas are often divided into three geographical areas: North America, Mexico and Central America, and South America. Greenberg s (1987 classification grouped the languages into three super-families that he called Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind. Of these, the most controversial is Amerind, though there is some physical evidence for this grouping (Cavalli-Sforza). But the grouping has been widely contested, for reasons summarized by Campbell (2012: 19), referring to Paul Rivet, who worked on a classification of South American languages in the first half of the twentieth century: Greenberg s subgroups have been met with skepticism for a number of reasons, including the underanalyzed nature of the presented data, the perpetuation of old misunderstandings [ ], and the fact that recent findings may suggest entirely different groupings. 5.1 North America The approximately 300 surviving languages of native North America are grouped by Golla et al. (2007) into fourteen major families and nineteen minor families with an additional twenty-fve isolates. The major families are Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, Algic, Wakashan, Salishan, Utian, Plateau, Cochimi-Yuman, Uto-Aztecan, Kiowa-Tanoan, Siouan-Catawba, Caddoan, Muskogean, and Iroquoian. These and the remaining groupings in Golla et al. (2007) represent a compromise rather than a consensus, and it is unclear whether any individual, including the authors themselves, accepts them in toto Eskimo-Aleut The Aleut branch has just one language, variously called Aleut or Unangax and spoken by 155 in the Aleutian and Pribilof islands (Alaska) and the Commander Islands (Siberia). Eskimo has two branches, Inuit and Yupik. Because the term Eskimo is deemed offensive by many, especially in Canada and Greenland, Yupik-Inuit is sometimes used instead Na-Dene The name Na-Dene is absent from the latest Ethnologue listing, having been replaced by Eyak- Athabaskan. At one time Na-Dene was thought to include Haida (Sapir 1915), but this view has been abandoned by most (Schoonmaker 1997). Navajo belongs to the Apachean group of Athabaskan, a branch of Na-Dene with forty-two languages widely distributed across the western U.S. and western Canada. Its morphology is interesting because of a complex prefix system that might lead it to be classified as agglutinative, were it not for complex, overlapping dependencies that are more characteristic of fusional languages. Like many Athabaskan languages, Navajo is tonal, yet proto-athabaskan lacked tone, and tone seems to have developed independently in many Athabaskan languages from constricted vowels (Campbell 1997: 113).

17 Algic This family has forty-two languages, all but two in the Algonquian branch, distributed across a wide expanse of Eastern Canada and the northeastern United States Wakashan Wakashan, a family of seven languages in British Columbia, was assigned by Edward Sapir (in a 1929 Encyclopedia Brittanica entry) to a putative stock called Mosan that also included the Salishan family (below). Sapir s conjecture was based on a long list of shared grammatical similarities. But Beck 2000, echoing Campbell 1997, finds little lexical similarity and concludes that that one is dealing with a Sprachbund (Thomason & Kaufman 1992), a set of languages whose common features have arisen from contact rather than from shared genetic origins Salishan The twenty-six languages of this family are spoken in the coastal regions and in the region immediately to the east in British Columbia and in nearby areas in the U.S. One of typological distinctions of Salishan languages is an extremely rich set of consonant contrasts up to six pharyngeal consonants, contrasting velars and uvulars, and a full set of ejectives Utian Approximately a dozen languages in the Utian family of central and northern California are divided into two branches, Miwok and Costanoan Plateau Also known as Plateau Penutian, this group of four languages in the Pacific Northwest includes Klamath and Nez Percé Cochimi-Yuman Also called Yuman, this group of eight small language plus extinct Cochimi is spoken in Arizona and neighboring parts of California and Mexico Uto-Aztecan Sixty-one languages make up this family. The thirteen languages of the Northern branch are spoken in the western United States. Among them is Hopi, spoken by 6,700 in and around northeastern Arizona. The Southern branch has forty-eight languages, almost all of them in Mexico Kiowa-Tanoan Speakers of the five languages making up this family live in the southwestern U.S Siouan-Catawba This family, also called Siouan, includes Catawba, a language of South Carolina, which lost its last native speaker in the twentieth century but is being revived as a second language by ethnic Catawbas. Total speakers for the Siouan family are under 35,000, but among its fourteen languages is Dakota, spoken in North and South Dakota and neighboring areas. As noted earlier, after Navajo, Dakota is the third largest indigenous language of North America and nearly tied for second place with Yupik, with close to 19,000 speakers.

18 Caddoan This group of five languages, each with just a handful of speakers, may possibly form a superfamily with Iroquoian and Siouan, based on comparative work (Chafe 1976), but the relationship is not considered established (Mithun 1999: 305) Muskogean Traces of this family of six languages, roughly estimated at around 150,000 speakers, are still found in the southeastern U.S., but forced relocations by the U.S. government in the 1830 s drove many Muskogean tribes from their homeland. Included were the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, now situated in Oklahoma Iroquoian Seven members of this family are severely endangered. Of the remaining two, Mohawk is estimated to have 540 speakers in the Canadian provinces Ontario and Quebec, and Cherokee has over 11,500 speakers in the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau Report, mainly in Oklahoma but also near their pre-relocation lands in North Carolina. 5.2 Mexico and Central America Uto-Aztecan The Southern branch of this family includes twenty-eight varieties of Nahuatl in Mexico and one in El Salvador that altogether number 1.5 million according to the 2010 census. Nahuatl traces its origins to the Aztecs who dominated the area for many centuries Mayan The thirty-one languages comprising Mayan are spoken mainly in Guatemala and Mexico, also in Belize and Honduras. Estimates of the number of speakers of Mayan languages run to six million, with well over half that number in Guatemala. The most important Mayan languages of Guatemala are K iche, with 2,330,000 speakers, Q eqchi with 800,000, Mam with 530,000, and Kaqchikel with 451,000. In Mexico, Yucatec Maya is spoken by 736,000, and a few others are spoken by well over a hundred thousand. The languages are still centered around the original Maya homeland in Guatemala and on the Yucatan peninsula. Among the noteworthy achievements of early Maya civilization were temples, pyramids, and the only writing system developed in the Americas before the coming of the European explorers. Decipherment of the writing system has offered a direct glimpse into the Mayan protolanguage and makes a fascinating story, recounted by Coe 1999) Otomanguean This is a large family of 177 languages spoken in central and southern Mexico. In the Eastern Otomanguean branch are the Mixtecan languages, including Trique and fifty-two varieties of Mixtec listed in Ethnologue, and sixty-three Zapotecan languages, including Chatino and fiftyseven varieties of Zapotec listed in Ethnologue. Recent census estimates for both Mixtec and Zapotec are in the area of 500,000 speakers. The Western Otomanguean branch numbers thirty-