Chapter 5: LanguageKey Issue 1

Vocabulary

LanguageLiterary TraditionOfficial LanguageLanguage FamilyLanguage BranchLanguage GroupLogograms

World Languages

6,909 languages total11 spoken by at least 100 million people- any guesses?

English German Portuguese Spanish Russian Arabic Bengali Hindi Japanese Lahnda Mandarin

Language Family

Language Family- a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history

Examples: INDO-EUROPEAN, examples: English, German, French,

Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Sanskrit HAMITO-SEMITIC (Afro-Asiatic), examples: Arabic, Hebrew,

Berber, Tuareg, Somali, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian SINO-TIBETAN, examples: Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan,

Burmese MALAYO-POLYNESIAN (Austronesian): Malagasy, Indonesian,

Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Samoan, Hawaiian

Language Branch

Language Branch- a collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago Differences are not as old or as extensive between language

families Archaeological evidence can confirm that the branches

derived from the same familyExample: Indo-European Family has lots of

branches, including… Germanic branch- includes Dutch, German, English,

Icelandic, Danish, Swedish Slavic branch- includes Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak,

Russian, Bulgarian, Polish

Language Group

Language Group- a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display many similarities in grammar and vocabulary

Example: the Semitic branch includes these groups… Languages spoken in the Middle East and North

Africa (Aramaic, Arabic, Canaanite), as well as… Ethiopian languages (Geez, Gafat, Amharic, Tigre,

Harari), and South Arabian languages

Percentage of People Who Speak a Language From Each Major Family

Widely Used Language Families

Indo-European is the most widely used and is predominant in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin America

Sino-Tibetan is the second most widely used and includes languages spoken in China as well as some smaller countries in Southeast Asia Most predominantly spoken is Mandarin Mandarin is one of the six official languages of the UN (the

others are Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic, and English) These languages include logograms, which are often compounds

Several different language families developed in Southern and Eastern Asia- why? Islands and peninsulas- isolation

Examples of Logograms

How Do Languages Develop?

Migration Isolation Dialects Incomprehensibility

What Language Distributions Can Tell Us

History and conquestIsolation or integration of culturesMigration of peoplesEconomic domination of certain culturesInfluence of wealth and technology Political divisionsPhysical geography barriers