Chapter 5: Languages

Characteristics of the Austro-Asiatic language family?

- 2% of the world's people. - Vietnamese is most spoken. - Written with the Roman alphabet, with the addition of a large number of diacritical marks above the vowels.

Characteristics of the Austronesian language family?

- 6% of the world's people. - Mostly in Indonesia. - Javanese (84 million) - 706 others - Inhabitants dispersed among thousands of islands.

What are some African languages?

- Afro-Asiatic - Niger-Congo - Nilo-Saharan

Characteristics of Afro-Asiatic languages?

- Arabic is the major language. - The official language in two dozen countries of Southwest Asia and North Africa. - 206 million people speak and write it. - Most also speak a second language that is distinct from the original. - Hebrew

What are the three largest language families of Southeast Asia?

- Austronesian - Austro-Asiatic - Tai-Kadai

How are language families organized?

- Branch - Family - Group

What are some other Asian language families?

- Dravidian - Altaic - Uralic

Characteristics of the Sino-Tibetan family?

- Encompasses languages spoken in China and in several smaller countries in Southeast Asia. - Mandarin

Origin of English: Norman Invasion

- England was conquered by the Normans, who came from present-day Normandy, France in 1066. - Conquered for 300 years. - The majority of the people, who had little education did not know French so that continued to speak English to each other. - " England lost control of Normandy" in 1204. - The Germanic language used by the common people and the French used by the leaders mingled to form a new language.

Combining English with other languages

- Franglais - Spanglish - Dengmish

What are two largest language families?

- Indo-European - Sino-Tibetan

Characteristics of Niger-Congo languages?

- More than 95% of the people in sub-Saharan Africa speak languages of the Niger-Congo family. - The three most widely spoken languages are Yoruba, Igbo, and Swahili. - Yoruba and Igbo are among the many languages of Nigeria. - Swahili is an official language only in Tanzania, but it is the first language of 15 million people and is spoken as a second language by another 25 million. - Used to communicate with outsiders. - Has strong Arabic influences.

Characteristics of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European family?

- Most speakers - Group languages - Written in the Arabic alphabet. - Persian (Farsi) in Iran - Pasho in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan - Kurdish used by Kurds of western Iran, northern Iraq, and eastern Turkey. - Most widely used languages in south Asia belong to Indic group. - The official language of India is Hindi. - when this was proposed speakers of other languages strongly objected. - English has been retained as a secondary official language. - India also recognizes 22 scheduled languages. - 15 Indo-European - 4 Dravidian - 2 Sino-Tibetan - 1 Austro-Asiatic

Characteristics of the Indo-European family?

- Most widely used. - Predominant one in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin America. - Eight branches. - Widely used - Indo-Iranian - Germanic - Romance - Balto-Slavic - Relatively few people - Albanian - Armenian - Celtic - Greek

Characteristics of African languages?

- No known precise number. - Scholars disagree on classifying them into families. - Not all have a literary tradition.

Characteristics of the Tai-Kadai language family?

- Originally Sino-Tibetan. - Principal languages are spoken in Thailand and neighboring portions of China. - Linguistic scholars speculate these languages may have migrated from the Philippines. - Similarities with the Austronesian family.

What two groups is the Indo-Iranian branch (of the Indo-European family) divided into?

1) Iranian or Western - Indic or Eastern

Number of languages in terms of how many people speak it?

Fewer than one million (6,108 out of 7,102), 1-10 million (304), at least 10 million (90).

Common ancestry of Indo-European languages characteristics?

If Germanic,Romance, Balto Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages are all part of the same Indo-European family then they must be descended from a single common ancestral language. - Proto-Indo-European - The languages share certain words.

East Asia language family is made up of?

Japanese and Korean

What is Atkinson's theory?

Language originated in Africa. - Most complex and diverse there. - Humans elsewhere display less linguistic diversity. - Shorter time to evolve into new languages.

Languages based on if they are institutional, developing, vigorous, in trouble, or dying?

Vigorous, developing, in trouble, institutional, dying.

The interplay between ___________ and _________ helps explain the distribution of individual languages and entire language families.

interaction and isolation

People in two locations speak the same language because of _________ from one of the locations to another.

migration

How did Romance languages originate and diffuse?

- Originated from Latin, the Romans language - (2,000 years ago) At its height the Roman empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the black sea on the east and encompassed all lands border in the Mediterranean Sea. - The Romans took their language with them, and suppressed/extinguished the language spoken by the natives. - Latin varied to some extent from one province to another. - The empire grew over the span of several hundred years. - Collapse of Roman Empire —> greater regional variation in spoken in Latin. - Resulting in regions being separated for long enough that distinct languages began to evolve.

Characteristics of the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European family?

- Pre-dominant in Eastern Europe. - Slavic was the single language but differences developed when people moved from Asia to different areas of eastern Europe Europe and therefore lived in isolation from one another. - resulting in east west and south Slava groups as well as a Baltic group. - The most widely used Slavic languages are the eastern ones primarily Russian. - Spoken by more than 80% of the Russian people. - Soviet officials forced native speakers of other languages to learn Russian. - West Slavic - The most spoken language is Polish followed by Czech and Slovak. - South Slavic - Southern countries - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia Montenegro, and Serbia. - When they were all part of Yugoslavia the language was called Serbo-Croatian. - Differences among all of the Slavic languages are relatively small but are also being preserved in recent movements.

Characteristics of Dravidian languages?

- Principal ones in southern Asia. - Telugu - Tamil - Origin is unknown. - Has been studied less than other widely used language families. - Speakers were already present when Indo-European speakers arrived.

Characteristics of Quechuan languages?

- Quechuan is the most widely used language family in the Western Hemisphere other than Indo-European. - Speakers live primarily in the Andes Mountains. - Used by 9 million people. - Most speakers of a Quechuan language use Spanish first. - Aymara - Indigenous language family in the Andes. - 3 million speakers - Mostly in Bolivia.

Characteristics of the Romance branch of Indo-European family?

- Spanish - Portugues - French - Italian - Regions in which these four languages are spoken correspond somewhat to the boundaries of the modern states of Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. - Romanian - The language of Romania and Moldova. - Separated from the other Romance-speaking European countries by Slavic-speaking peoples.

Characteristics of Nilo-Saharan languages?

- Spoken by 43 million people in north-central Africa (in between the Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo families). - Divisions within the family exemplify the problem of classifying African languages. - Relatively few speakers - Divided into six branches, plus numerous groups and subgroups. - The total number of speakers of each individual language is extremely small.

Characteristics of Uralic languages?

- Spoken by Estonians, Finns, and Hungarians. - Traceable back to a common language first used 7,000 years ago. - Migrants carried these languages to Europe, carving out homelands in the midst of Germanic and Slavic-speaking peoples and retaining their language.

Origin of English: German envasion

- The British Isles have been inhabited for it for thousands of years. - The Celts arrived around 2000 BC speaking languages we call Celtic. - Around AD 450 tribes from mainland Europe invaded pushing the Celts into the remote northern and western parts of Britain including Cornwall and the Highlands of Scotland and Wales. - The tribe invading the British Isles were known as the Angles, Judes, and Saxons. - Modern English involved primarily from the language spoken by the stripes. - The common origin of English with other Germanic languages can be reconstructed by analyzing language differences that emerged after Germanic groups migrated to separate territories and lived in isolation from each other. - Other people subsequently invaded England and added their language to the basic English. - Vikings from present day Norway landed on the north eastern coast of England.

Origin of English

- The contemporary distribution of English speakers around the world exist because the people of England migrated with your language when they establish colonies over the course of four centuries. - Migration to North America (1607 and 1620). - Defeated France - Ireland - South Asia - South Pacific - Southern Africa

Nomadic Warrior Theory

- The first Proto-Indo-European speakers were the Kurgan people. - They were among the first people to domesticate horses and chariots. - Migrated in search of grasslands for their animals. - Established military superiority and conquered much of Europe and South Asia.

Sedentary Farmer Theory

- The first speakers of the Proto-Indo-European lived 2000 years before the Kurgan's. - There is some controversy about when these speakers were around. - Theory argues that Indo-European diffused into Europe and south Asia along with agricultural practices rather than military conquest.

Characteristics of Altaic languages?

- Thought to have originated in the steppes bordering the Qilian Shan and Altai mountains between Tibet and China. - Present distribution covers and 8,000-kilometer band of Asia. - Most speakers in Turkish. - When the Soviet Union governed most of the Altaic-speaking region of Central Asia, use of Altaic languages was suppressed. - With the dissolution of the SU (early 1990s), Altaic languages became official in several new countries. - Azerbaijan - Kazakhstan - Turkmesistan - Uzbekistan

Characteristics of the Germanic branch of Indo-European family?

- West Germanic - English - German - Dutch - North Germanic - Scandinavian languages - Swedish - Danish - Norwegian - Icelandic - Derive from Old Norse, the principal language spoken throughout Scandinavia. - The four emerged because of migration and political organization of the region into four independent isolated countries.

Characteristics of Korean?

- Written in a system known as hunkul (hangul/onmun). - Each letter represents a sound. - More than half of the vocabulary derives from Chinese words. - Chinese and Japanese words are the principal sources for creating new words to describe new technology and concepts.

Characteristics of Japanese?

- Written in part with Chinese characters. - Uses two systems of phonetic symbols. - Chinese cultural traits have diffused into Japanese society, including the original form of writing Japanese. - Different structure

Principal language family of South Asia?

Dravidian