Chapter 5: Language Over 6,900 different languages worldwide
Language is a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understands to have the same meaning
Key Issue 1 Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed? English is spoken by 328 million people as a first language and fluently spoken by up to 1 billion more English is the official language in 57 countries, more than any other (not U.S.)
Diffusion of English - Spread around the world by England s quest for colonies Brought to England by the Germanic tribes Angles, Jutes, and Saxons Mixed with French when the Normans conquered the area English began as a mix of French and Germanic languages
Dialects of English Dialect = a regional variation of a language Isogloss = a word-usage boundary Standard language = a wellestablished dialect
British vs. American English Early settlers brought language familiar to them As countries developed across the ocean the language diverged Pronunciation differences emerged, new vocabulary was needed, and Webster was determined to have an American dialect of English so words were spelled differently
Key Issue 2 Why Is English Related to Other Languages? 8 Indo-European branches 4 w/large groups of speakers Language branch a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago Germanic: Dutch/English/ Scandinavian languages Indo-Iranian: Hindi/Farsi Balto-Slavic: Russian/Ukrainian Romance: Spanish/French/Italian
Romance or Roman s language spread Latin across the empire Vulgar Latin: spoken form of Latin spread by the soldiers 1494- Treaty of Tordesillas
A Proto-Indo-European language? Internal evidence similar words Nomadic warrior theory Marija Gimbutas Kurgan people Sedentary farmer theory Colin Renfrew agricultural
Key Issue 3 Where Are Other Language Families Distributed? Classification of languages: Indo-European = the largest language family - 46 percent of the world s population speaks an Indo-European language Sino-Tibetan = the second largest language family 21 percent of the world s population speaks a Sino- Tibetan language Mandarin = the most used language in the world
Ideograms: represent ideas or concepts, not specific pronunciations
Other East and Southeast Asian language families Austronesian: mostly in Indonesia w/ over 700 active languages Austro-Asiatic: Vietnamese alphabet devised by Roman Catholic missionaries
Japanese diffused w/chinese but structure different Korean uses hangul each letter represents a sound
Languages of the Middle East and Central Asia Afro-Asiatic: Arabic = most widely spoken Altaic: Turkish = most widely spoken Uralic: Estonian, Hungarian, and Finnish
African language families Extensive linguistic diversity - 1,000 distinct languages + thousands of dialects Niger-Congo: 95 percent of sub-saharan Africans speak a Niger-Congo language Swahili is most common
Nilo-Saharan: spoken by a few million people in north-central Africa Khoisan: Click languages mostly in southern Africa
Key Issue 4 Why Do People Preserve Languages? Extinct languages: once in use, but no longer spoken or read in daily activities by anyone in the world Hebrew was basically extinct but revived in Israel to unite the people
Nearly 500 endangered languages today Preserving endangered languages: Celtic
Multilingual states: Belgium speaks Romance and Germanic languages Walloons (southern Belgians) speak French and Flemings (northern Belgians) speak Flemish (dialect of Dutch)
Basque spoken near the Pyrenees mountains and in Barcelona Isolated languages: language unrelated to any other and therefor not attached to any language family
Global dominance of English English: An example of a lingua franca Lingua franca = an international language Pidgin language = a simplified version of a language Ebonics
Franglais Spanglish Denglish
All photos: Sean Simons