V.

Languages of the World

Spoken-gestured-signalled communication involves the same process for all humans, and any human language can convey any human thought; nevertheless, the actual languages spoken in the world are numerous, and they differ vastly in their sound systems and grammatical structures.

A.

Classification by Form

Languages can be classified by the form of their grammar. Beginning in the 19th century, linguists attempted to group the world's languages into four morphological, or typological, categories (that is, categories based on how words are formed): analytic, agglutinating, inflectional (or synthetic), and incorporating (or polysynthetic). Analytic languages typically have words of one syllable with no affixes, or added parts; words are on their own, isolated, as in Chinese. In agglutinating (from the Latin for “to glue to”) languages, words are composed of roots, or basic parts, and one or more affixes (prefixes at the beginning, infixes in the middle, and suffixes at the end of words) with distinct meanings. An example is Turkish, which has äv (“house”), ävdä (“in the house”), ävlär (“houses”), and ävlärda (“in the houses”). In inflectional languages, the basic and added parts have merged, and the added parts have no independent meaning. For example, in Latin, which is inflectional, the subject's person and number are reflected in the form of the verb, as in fero (“I bear”), ferimus (“we bear”), and ferent (“they bear”). Swahili is also agglutinating, as in hatukuviwanunulia, which means “We did not buy them (= things) for them (= people)”. The components of this word are ha (negative), tu (“we”), ku (indicator of past), vi (“them”, meaning “objects”), wa (“them”, meaning “people”), and nunulia (“buy for”). Polysynthetic languages have very long, complex words that have a mixture of agglutinating and synthetic features. Examples include Eskimo languages and Mohawk, all Native American languages.

B.

Genetic Classification

Even though two languages form words or organize sentence elements in the same way, they are not necessarily related to each other. To establish relationships among languages is to study their genealogy and classify them genetically. Unlike a typological classification, a genetic classification involves comparing the sound and meaning units of different languages in order to show common parentage. Like family resemblances among people, shared genetic resemblances among related languages do not depend on where the languages are spoken or when they existed.

Members of a language family have a historical connection with one another and descend in common from a single ancestor. Language family trees show the relationships among languages; the oldest traceable ancestor language is shown at the top of the tree, and the bottom branches show the distance of relationship among current living members of the family. Related languages are alike in that their grammatical elements and vocabulary show regular correspondences in both sound and meaning. For example, the English word fish corresponds to Latin piscis, and English father to Latin pater. The English and Latin words are cognates, that is, genetically the same. Where English has f, Latin has p; English th corresponds to Latin t; and so forth. Comparative linguistics is the field in which sound and meaning correspondences (that is, cognates) among languages are analysed; genetic groups of languages are established; and by comparing modern languages, the hypothetical ancestor languages of such groups are tentatively reconstructed. (Such reconstructed precursor languages are indicated by the term proto-, as in Proto-Indo-European.)

B.1.

European and Asian Families

The best-known language family is the Indo-European family, which represents about 1.6 billion people and includes most of the languages of Europe and northern India and several languages of the region in between. Indo-European has the following subfamilies: Italic, Germanic, Celtic, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, and the extinct Anatolian, Phrygian, Thracian, Tocharian, and Unclassified Indo-European. Further sub-classifications exist within subfamilies. English, for example, belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic subfamily. The closest relative of English is Frisian, which is spoken today in parts of Germany and the Netherlands. The relationship of English to other Indo-European languages such as Swedish (North Germanic), Latin (Italic), and Sanskrit (Indo-Iranian) is progressively more distant.

The Indo-European family is only one of over a hundred families and proposed larger groupings. Linguists differ in their approach to classification, and what a conservative scholar may term a family, another more liberal scholar may consider a subfamily within a larger grouping. Conservative scholars, on the other hand, may consider that too little evidence exists to support such larger groupings.

Other languages are present in Europe besides the Indo-European family. Basque is an isolate, or a language with no known relatives; and Finnish, Estonian, Saami, and Hungarian are the westernmost members of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family (which also includes various languages of the Ural Mountains region and Siberia). Occasionally linked with the Uralic languages in a Ural-Altaic group (a relationship now rejected by most scholars) is the Altaic family, the main branches of which are Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus. Several unrelated language groups of Siberia are referred to by the regional name Palaeosiberian languages. In the Caucasus three groups, possibly related, have been identified; the best known of the Caucasian languages is Georgian. Many languages of India and its north-west neighbours belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Two other groups—the Munda languages, usually considered a branch of the Austro-Asiatic languages, and the Dravidian family—represent more than 80 million speakers (see Indian Languages). In South East Asia the Sino-Tibetan languages have hundreds of millions of speakers. The family's principal branches are the Tibeto-Burman and the Sinitic (which includes the many Chinese “dialects”, really separate languages). Some scholars attach the Tai-Kadai languages (including Thai or Siamese) to this family; most consider them of separate ancestry.

B.2.

Pacific and African Languages

In the Pacific, the three main language groups are, first, the Austronesian languages, a family that has a Western or Indonesian branch and an Eastern or Oceanic branch; second, the Papuan languages, a regional group of New Guinea, comprising a number of isolates and families (some possibly related to one another); and third, the Australian Aboriginal languages (related to one another but not to non-Australian languages). The extinct Tasmanian language may represent a fourth group.

Africa has four language families, the largest of which (with over 1,400 languages) is Niger-Congo. The Niger-Congo family includes branches such as Mande, Atlantic, Gur, and Benue-Congo, which includes Africa's most widespread group, the Bantu languages (such as Swahili and Zulu), and Yoruba (of the Benue-Congo sub-set), one of the most widely spoken languages in Africa (along with Swahili and Hausa). The around 400 languages of the Afro-Asiatic family originate from parts of Africa and Asia. The family's branches include Semitic, including Arabic and Hebrew (see Semitic Languages); Chadic, including Hausa; Berber; Cushitic; Omotic; and Egyptian, of which the sole member is the extinct Egyptian language. In the Nilo-Saharan family, which is made up of around 200 languages and several sub-groups, the principal sub-division is East Sudanic; its Nilotic branch includes such languages as Maasai, while the Saharan branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages includes Kanuri. The Khoisan family comprises around 30 Click languages of the San and other peoples of southern Africa. See also African Languages.

B.3.

Native American Languages

Attempts to classify Native American languages have resulted in the conservative identification of more than 150 families. In liberal classifications these are further grouped into about a dozen so-called superstocks (superfamilies, or groups of families that may be remotely related), but recent studies have challenged such groupings. Even with a liberal approach, many small families remain unlinked to larger groups, and many isolates exist. Along the Arctic coast and in Greenland, Inupiaq (Eskimo-Aleut family) is spoken by the Inuit (Eskimo). Subarctic Canada includes various Athabascan and Algonquian languages. Native American languages in the United States east of the Mississippi River are predominantly Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean. The principal Great Plains family is the Siouan, but Caddoan and western Algonquian languages are also spoken. Shoshonean languages (Uto-Aztecan family) dominate the Great Basin, bordered on the north by the Sahaptian family. On the Northwest Coast are the Salishan and Wakashan families, Tlingit (thought to be related to Athabascan languages), and a probable isolate, Haida. The Apachean branch of Athabascan is found throughout the Southwest, alongside the Yuman family and the Pima-Papago language (Uto-Aztecan) of Arizona and southern California. In California many small families exist, their mutual relationships often disputed.

Important in Mexico and Central America are the Uto-Aztecan family (Aztec or Nahuatl), the Oto-Manguean superstock (Mixtec, Otomí, and Zapotec, among others), and families such as Mixe-Zoquean, Totonacan, and Tequistlatecan. The Mayan family comprises about two dozen languages with millions of speakers.

Depending on their approach, linguists classify South American languages into 90-odd families and isolates or into three nearly all-inclusive superstocks; Macro-Chibchan, Andean-Equatorial, and Gê-Pano-Carib. The most widely spoken native South American languages are Quechua and Aymara, Guaraní, and Mapuche or Araucanian. Important in Central America and northern South America are Macro-Chibchan languages (such as Guaymí, Paez, and Warao) and also the large Arawakan group (including Island or Black Carib, Guajiro, and Campa). The widely accepted Macro-Gê superstock includes many languages spoken in the Brazilian tropics.

C.

Areal Classification

The geographical, or areal, classification of languages is also useful. Areal classification is based on the observation of the ways in which neighbouring languages have influenced one another. In discussions of the Northwest Coast languages of North America, for example, statements are often made that these languages share various consonants of a certain type, or that they all have a large fishing-related vocabulary. Underlying such statements is an assumption that the similarities exist because, over time, these languages have borrowed grammar, sounds, and vocabulary from one another. Such regional resemblances, however, do not necessarily indicate either genetic relationship or typological similarity.

D.

Written and Spoken Language

When individual languages have a written as well as a spoken form, it is often the case that the writing system does not represent all the distinctive sounds of the language. The writing system of one language may make use of symbols from the writing system of another language, applying them to sounds, syllables, or morphemes for which they were not originally intended. Written and spoken forms of the same language can be compared by studying the “fit” between the writing system and the spoken language.

Many kinds of writing systems exist. In Chinese, a written character is used for every morpheme. The written form of the Cherokee language has a symbol for every consonant-and-vowel syllable. Japanese is also written with such a system, which is called a syllabary. In writing systems using an alphabet, such as the Latin alphabet, each symbol theoretically stands for a sound in the spoken language. The Latin alphabet has 26 letters, and languages written with it generally use all 26, whether their spoken form has more or fewer sounds. Although it is used for written English, the Latin alphabet does not have symbols for all the sounds of English. For example, for some sounds, combinations of two letters (digraphs), such as th, are used. Even so, the combination th does not indicate the spoken distinction between th in “thin” and th in “this”.

The written form of a language is static, unchanging, reflecting the form of the language at the time the alphabet, syllabary, or character system was adopted. The spoken form is dynamic, always changing; eventually, the written and spoken forms may no longer coincide. One of the problems with the English written language is that it still represents the pronunciation of the language several centuries ago. The word light, for example, is today pronounced “lite”; the spelling “light” reflects the former pronunciation. In languages with writing systems that have been recently developed (such as Swahili) or reformed (such as Hebrew), the written and spoken forms are more likely to fit.

Unlike speech, writing may ignore pitch and stress, omit vowels, or include punctuation and capitalization. The written and spoken forms of a language also differ in that writing does not incorporate spoken dialect differences. Speakers of mutually unintelligible Chinese languages or dialects, for example, can read one another's writing even though they cannot communicate through speech. Similarly, speakers of the different German dialects all write in High German, the accepted standard form of the language. See also Writing.

E.

Standard and Non-standard Language

The written form of a language may have more prestige than the spoken form, and it also may have a more complex grammar and a distinctive vocabulary. A standard written literary language thus tends to influence the speech of educated people. In certain circumstances they will try to imitate it when they talk, and they may relegate the unwritten form to situations where prestige is less important. In Arabic-speaking countries, for example, educated people sometimes use classical Arabic in speech as well as in writing, whereas uneducated people speak only colloquial Arabic. The use of two such varieties of a single language by the same speaker in different situations is called diglossia. People who use the spoken form of a standard literary dialect in public and their native regional dialect when they are with friends (as do many German-speaking Swiss) are said to be diglossic.

A standard language is that one of the language's dialects that has become dominant. Often, such dominance is due to governmental policy whereby one dialect is given prestige over others, and various regulations or customs ensure that it is used. A standard variety is not in any way inherently superior to other dialects and is, itself, just another dialect with its own individual grammar, vocabulary, and accent (while the standard can—and is—spoken in many accents, there is usually one accent that is held as more prestigious than others, as in Received Pronunciation in the UK). The standard language (such as High German) is frequently the dialect used in writing; that is, it is the literary language of a speech community, or at least a dialect that has an existing orthography and a body of material written in it.

Few people actually speak such a standard language; rather, they approximate it with their own regional variations. The standard dialect is the one that is used when a language is taught to nonnative speakers; the learners then speak it, but do so with an accent, or variation carried over from their first language and region. The standard language also provides a common means of communication among speakers of regional dialects (as in the examples given above for German). Standard languages are thus highly useful in efforts to unite people and create a sense of national spirit.

F.

Dialect, Argot, and Jargon

A dialect is a variety of a language that differs consistently from other varieties of the same language used in different geographical areas or by different social groups. For example, Boston residents who speak the New England dialect of American English drink tonic and frappés, whereas people in Los Angeles sip sodas and milkshakes. Within groups of people who speak the same geographical or social dialect, other language variations exist that depend on specific situations. People who have activities in common or share a profession or trade may have a special “language” called an argot that identifies them as distinct from outsiders. Teenagers, thieves, and prostitutes have an argot separating them from parents, police, and other authorities. Such a specialized informal argot is called slang. An argot or specialized terminology, as shared by members of a profession, without any connotation of slang, is called a jargon. Professional groups with distinct jargons include doctors, lawyers, clergy, linguists, and art critics. (The use of the terms argot, jargon, and slang, however, varies somewhat from writer to writer).

G.

Pidgins and Creoles

Just as a language may develop varieties in the form of dialects and argots, languages as a whole may change (Latin, for example, evolved into the different Romance languages). Sometimes rapid language change occurs as a result of contact between people who each speak a different language. In such circumstances a new language, called a pidgin may arise (see Pidgins and Creoles). Pidgins are based on one language from which they take much of their vocabulary but are also influenced by at least one other language; they have relatively small sound systems, reduced vocabularies, and simplified and altered grammars, and they rely heavily on context in order to convey meaning. Pidgins are often the result of contact by traders with island and coastal peoples. A pidgin has no native speakers; when speakers of a pidgin have children who learn the pidgin as their first language, that language is then called a creole. Once the creole has enough native speakers to form a speech community, the creole may expand into a fuller language. This is the case with Krio, a language with many speakers in Sierra Leone in West Africa. Krio arose from what was originally an English-based pidgin and has influences from Yoruba among other languages.

H.

International Languages

In the midst of world linguistic diversity, a number of international languages have been proposed as a means for solving world problems thought to be caused by misunderstandings of communication. Sometimes, existing natural languages are advanced to fill this role. These so-called LWCs (Languages of Wider Communication)—such as English or French, already spoken by many people as a second language as well as by many native speakers—have proponents who hold that everyone should know one or the other. More often, efforts have been made to construct artificial languages for everyone to learn. A number of artificial languages have enjoyed a period of vogue, then fallen into disuse. One artificial language, Esperanto, has had a relatively high success rate because it has a regular grammar, an “easy” pronunciation, and a vocabulary based on Latin and ancient Greek and on the Romance and Germanic languages. To speakers of languages of other families, however, Esperanto seems less international and is harder to speak and learn. One new language proposed for international use is LOGLAN (standing for logical language), a laboratory-created language that is claimed to be culture-free and to allow people to speak their thoughts clearly and unambiguously. It has a small sound system and few grammatical rules, and its vocabulary is drawn from the eight most widely spoken languages in the world today, including Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, as well as Russian and other Indo-European languages.

Even if a perfect international language could be devised and adopted, however, it is by no means certain that it could minimize global communication problems. Moreover, the thought processes that relate languages to the ideas that people express with them are still not understood. Even if everyone did learn Esperanto or LOGLAN and used these languages in international or public dealings, it is probable that processes of language change would soon take over. The world would then have dialects of Esperanto or some other international language, leading eventually to even further differentiation or to pidginization, creolization, and so forth. Indeed, English and French in different parts of the world have already become differentiated; Indian English, for example, is different both from American English and from British English.