Language

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Language
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Language is broken into families, branches, and
groups.
A language family is a collection of languages
related through a common ancestor that existed
long before recorded history.
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The two largest language families are
Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan.
About 50 percent of all people speak a language
in the Indo-European family.
About 20 percent speak a language in the
Sino-Tibetan family.
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• Other major language families are
• Austronesian (in Southeast Asia)
• Afro-Asiatic (in the Middle East)
• Niger-Congo (in Africa)
• Dravidian (in India)

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• Within a language family, a language branch is
  a collection of languages related through a
  common ancestor that existed several thousand
  years ago.

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A language group is a collection of languages
within a branch that share a common origin in the
relatively recent past and display relatively few
differences in grammar and vocabulary.
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Germanic Language Branch

• The Germanic language branch is probably the most
  familiar to us because English is closely related
  to German and is in the West Germanic Group.

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German Language Branch in Europe
Orange Anglic Light Green Dutch Dark Green
High German Blues Scandinavian
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Romance Language Branch

• The Romance language branch evolved from the
  Latin language spoken by the Romans 2,000 years
  ago, giving the branch its name. The four most
  widely used Romance languages are Spanish,
  Portuguese, French, and Italian.

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These languages correspond to the European
countries of Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy.
Mountains separate these four countries and are
barriers to communication and trade.
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Sinitic Language Branch

• The Sinitic language branch is important because
  Chinese is in it. There is no single Chinese
  language, but Mandarin is the most important and
  is spoken by about three fourths of the Chinese
  people.

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Cantonese, Wu, Min, and Hakka are also spoken in
China, but the Chinese government is imposing
Mandarin on the country. The small number of
languages in China serve as a source of unity and
is in stark contrast to India or Sub-Saharan
Africa, where many languages are spoken.
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Ideograms

• The other distinctive feature of the Chinese
  language is the method of writing. Chinese is
  written from thousands of characters. Some of
  the characters represent sound by most are
  ideograms, which represent ideas and concepts.

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Horse
Mountain
Rain
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Japanese and Korean

• To an untrained eye, Japanese and Korean are
  similar to Chinese. In fact, Japanese is
  written, in part, with Chinese ideograms, but it
  also uses two systems of phonetic symbols.
  Korean is a separate language family and does not
  use ideograms. Each letter represents a sound.

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African Language Families

• No one knows the precise number of languages
  spoken in Africa. Nearly 1,000 distinct
  languages and several thousand dialects have been
  documented. Only ten languages in Africa are
  spoken by more than 10 million people.

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Arabic dominates northern Africa, but Sub-Saharan
Africa is extremely complicated. A good example
is Nigeria, which has over 200 languages. It is
difficult to find a common language that enough
people can understand. Having too many languages
can weaken national unity.
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Official Languages in Africa
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Why Do People in Different Locations Speak
Similar Languages?
Origin and diffusion of English
Origin and diffusion of Romance languages
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English is spoken by more than any other people
except Mandarin. Whereas Mandarin speakers are
all clustered in one country, China, English
speakers are distributed around the world.
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English speakers exist around the world because
people of England migrated with their language
when they established colonies during the past
four centuries. English is an official language
in most of the former British colonies.
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Ironically, English was not the original language
of England. We know nothing about the original
language of England, but 2,000 B.C. the Celts
arrived in England from Europe. In turn, the
Celts were invaded by Germanic tribes called the
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes around 450 A.D.
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Some people still speak Celtic languages in
Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but the dominate
language became English. The name England itself
is derived from Angles land.
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Diffusion of Romance Languages
Romance languages are also spoken around the
world because Europeans colonized other
countries. For example, Portuguese is spoken in
Brazil, and Spanish is spoken in most of Latin
America. French is still spoken in parts of
Africa and many islands in the Pacific.
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Map of Francophone World or countries that share
a French heritage and have many French speakers.
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French sign in West Africa
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This map shows how many people are fluent French
speakers in Europe. Black means native speaker.
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Number of French Speakers in the U.S. Red Over
18 of pop. speaks French. Brown 12 - 18 of
pop. speaks French. Yellow 6 - 12of pop.
speaks French.
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Areas with many Italian speakers
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Areas with many German speakers
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German signs in Namibia, Africa
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Countries where Spanish is an official language
or co-official language
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Dialects
A dialect is a regional variety of a language
distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and
pronunciation. British and American English are
examples of dialects of English. Another example
is French spoken in Quebec, Canada as opposed to
French spoken in France.
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Pidgin

• A simplified language that develops as a means of
  communication between two or more groups that do
  not have a language in common. See example of
  Hawaiin Pidgin below
• God goin do plenny good kine stuff fo him.
• You like try dat?
• I tryin fo tink.

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Creole

• A creole or creolized language is defined as a
  language that results from the mixing of the
  colonizers language with the indigenous language
  of the people being dominated. Creole languages
  develop as stable nativized pidgin languages.

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Lingua Franca
A language of international communication such as
English is known as a lingua franca. During the
19th century, French, was a lingua franca. It
was the preferred language of diplomats and
politicians, and a strong literary tradition
increased its use.
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A group that learns a lingua franca may learn a
simplified form, called a pidgin language. To
groups construct a pidgin language by learning a
few of the grammar rules and words of a lingua
franca, while mixing in words of their own
language.
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Diffusion to Other Languages

• Franglais
• Spanglish