AP HuGe - Chapter 5 Notes
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Language is very important because it is how things are communicated.
Communication is primarily speech but ASL (symbols) can be used as well. 466 million people know ASL.
20% of US students know a foreign language compared to 92% of European students.
Elements such as language, religion, and ethnicity can bring people together or pull them apart. *Centripetal force and centrifugal force*
Language is spread through migration.
Madagascar uses the same family of language as Indonesia and the Philippines because of migration.
If two groups have fewer interactions, their languages will start to diverse and create individual languages.
Historically, language has spread through relocation diffusion but now it can be through social media making it contagious diffusion as well.
When people move, they bring their language with them and contribute new words and phrases to their new language.
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There are 7,099 languages, 90 with 10 million or more people, 307 with 1-10 million people and 6,702 used by less than 1 million people.
Ethnologue is the most authoritative website about languages.
576 languages are institutional, including English.
1, 601 languages are developing, like Sama, a language spoken by 260,000 people in Southeast Asia.
2,455 languages are vigours, like Tagin, a language spoken by 38,000 people in India.
1,547 languages are threatened, like Bolinao, a language spoken by 56,000 people in the Philippines.
920 languages are dying, but some are being recovered as well as threatened languages.
Since some languages don’t have records because they aren’t written, this makes it difficult to know how many languages there truly are. *literary tradition*
Some languages, such as Hindim are spoken many ways but written one way, so Urdu which is spoken like Kindi is a different language because it is written a different way.
Indo-European is the most commonly used language family, which includes English.
English is from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family because the differences are not as extensive.
English is in the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family.
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There are 141 language families.
Quentin Atkinson, a biologist in New Zealand, believes languages come from Africa.
Language families with at least 7 million native users are Afro-Asiatic, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Hmong-Mien, Indo-European, Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Northern Caucasian, Quechuan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Turkic, and Uralic.
Afro-Asiatic - Southwest Asia and North Africa (Arabic and Hebrew)
Austro-Asiatic - Southeast Asia mainland (Vietnam)
Austronesian - Indonesia and nearby countries
Dravidian - Southern India and northern Sri Lanka
Hmong-Mien - Laos and Southern China
Indo-European - The Americas, Europe, Russia, Australia
Japanese - Japan
Korean - North and South Korea
Mongolic - In and near Mongolia
Niger-Congo - Southern Africa
Nilo-Saharan - North-central Africa
Northern Caucasian - Caucasus
Quechuan - Western South America
Sino-Tibetan - China
Tai-Kadai - Thailand and nearby countries
Turkic - Turkey and wide band across Asia
Uralic - Finland and Hungary
Languages with 100 million or more users include English, Mandarin, Japanese, Bengali.
Languages with 50-100 million users include French, German, Italian, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Korean, Wu, Yue, Vietnamese, Malay, and Javanese.
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90% of the world uses languages from the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, or Turkish language families
The rest of the world’s language are in 134 smaller language families.
Quechuan, spoken in the Western Hemisphere, is spoken by approximately 8 million speakers and Amara, spoken in the Andes, is spoken by 1 million.
Some linguists believe there are 3 “Superfamilies”, Sino-Caucasian, Nostralic, and Austric,
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TREE DIAGRAM
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Indo-European is the dominant language in Europe, South Asia, North and Latin America with 8 branches Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, Celtic, and Greek.
Indo-Iranian - Southwest Asia
Germanic - Germany and Northern Europe
Romance - Spain, France, and Romania
Balto-Slavic - East Europe and Russia
Albanian - Albania
Armenian - Armenia
Celtic - Northwest France and parts of UK
Greek - Greece
Indo-Iranian is the biggest branch in the Indo-European family.
Indo-Iranian is split into two groups Iranian (or Western) and Indo-Aryan.
Some languages in Iranian include Persian (Fersi) in Iran, Pashto in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, and Kurdish in western Iran, northern Iraq, and eastern Turkey. They all write with the arabic alphabet.
India’s official language is Hindi, an Indo-Aryan language, however they recognize 22 other languages.
Bengali, an Indo-Aryan language, is the official language of Bangladesh.
Urdu, similar to Hindi, is Pakistan’s official language with 8% of native users and Lahnda is also used in Pakistan. Both languages are Indo-Aryan.
Hindi is spoken mainly in northern India.
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German, Dutch, and English are in the west Germanic group.
Scandinava, a north Germanic group language, has 4 languages that are developed through migration and politics. These are Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.
Balto-Slavic languages are in Eastern Europe.
Russian, a slavic language, is Russia’s primary language. During the Soviet Union, people were forced to learn it if they were under control by the Soviet Union.
The most common western Slavic languages are Polish, Czech, and Slovak. They are very similar.
The most common southern Slavic languages are in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. They are all very similar but because of the past, they are now different languages.
Bosniaks and Croats use the Latin alphabet and Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet.
The four most use Romance languages are Spanish, Portugues, French, and Italian.
The four languages set “boundaries” between Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy.
Romanian, a Romance language, is spoken in Romania and Moldova but is separated from its similar languages by countries with Slavic languages.
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Almost all of China speaks languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family.
Sino-Tibetan is the second largest language family including Mandarin, the official language of China and Taiwan as well as one of the six official languages of United languages, Gan, Hakka, Jinyu, MIn Nan, Xiang, Wu, and Yue (Cantonese).
Japanese is very similar to China but its phonetic symbols can replace Chinese characters.
Korean is written in a system called hanku (or hangu or onmon) unlike Sino-Tibetan languages but their vocabulary is very similar.
The three biggest language families of southeast Asia are Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai.
Austronesian is spoken by 5% of the world mainly in Indonesia.
Indonesia has 706 living languages but Javanese, spoken by 84 million people, is the most common.
Austro-Asiatic is spoken by 2%, mainly Vietnamese which has a similar alphabet to the Latin alphabet with marks added above vowels.
The Tai-Kadai family used to be considered a branch of Sino-Tibetan but it is mainly spoken in Thailand and a little bit of China. Linguists think it originated from the Philippines.
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Dravidian and Turkic are the two most widely used languages across Europe.
Dravidian is the second most used language family in south Asia, mainly in south India.
Telugu and Tamil are part of the Dravidian family, which doesn’t have a know origin.
The Turkic language originated from mountains Qilian Shan and Altai between Tibet and China, covering 8,000 kilometers of China, used mainly by Turkish.
During the Soviet Union, the Turkish moved to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, meaning their language use decreased by is still present in the Ural mountains of present day Russia.
The number of languages in Africa are unknown but Ethnologue lists 2,146 are in Africa but only 699 have a literary tradition.
The third, Afro-Asiatic in North Africa, and fourth, Niger-Congo in sub-saharan Africa, biggest language families are in Africa.
Arabic is the biggest language in the Afro-Asiatic language family and is the official language of 24 countries and one of six official languages of United Nations.
206 million people speak and write Arabic as well as 65 million use Egyptian spoken Arabic.
Most Muslims know some Arabic because their holiest book, the Quran (Koran) is written in it as well as Hebrew.
95% of languages in sub-saharan are in the Niger-Congo family including Yoruba, Igbo, Swahili,
Swahili is the official language of Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Swahili is a very common language used to communicate with other people im Africa.
53 million people speak a language within the Nilo-saharan family this is in north-central Africa.
All languages in the Nilo-saharan family have a very small number of users.
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Some things are unknown about the origin and diffusion of some languages.
The Romance languages originated from Latin, which was Rome’s official language.
Latin diffused when the Roman empire conquered near lands and brought Latin with them.
In the places Latin was new, some of the old language’s words and phrases were conjoined with Latin.
When the Roman empire fell, the old conquered areas started to communicate less and form new languages based on Latin.
French is the official language in 29 countries with 21 in Africa.
Spanish is the official language in 18 Latin America countries with 10% of users living in Spain.
Portuguese is spoken by 200 million people in Brazil and 10 million in Portugal.
We don’t know the “core” language of the Indo-European family.
Proto-Indo-European (the “language” that created Indo-European) must have lived in a cold climate because Indo-European languages all have a similar words for winter/snow but not ocean.
Words like beech, oak, bear, deer, and bee are all similar but not elephant, camel, rice, and bamboo.
Linguists say Proto-Indo-European was in a place where there were trees and the other words were added after the language was separated into branches.
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Archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas believes Kurgans spoke Proto-Indo-European in 4300 BCE around the border of present day Russia and Kazakhstan.
He believed they migrated into central Europe and southwest Asia around 2500 BCE.
Archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, believes the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European were in 6700 BCE in east Turkey and call the Atatolion.
He believed they migrated west in Europe and East into Asia.
Linguists wonder if the diffusion of Indo-European was through warfare and conquest or through peaceful sharing of resources.
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The Celts in 2000 BCE are the first known people to speak a language in the British Isles called Celtic. In 450 CE, they were pushed North from Europeans.
The British Isles evolving into English was because the Germanic tribes, Angles, from southern Denmark, Jutes, from northern Denmark, and Saxons, from northwest Germany, invaded.
English peoples culture heritage is from Anglo-Saxons.
England comes from Angles’ land and English comes from the Angles language, Englisc.
The Germanic branch used to all speak a similar language but after migration, new languages started to form independently.
Other groups such as the Vikings invaded/tried to invade England and contributed new words from their language.
The Normans were the last successful invaders of England.
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The Normans invaded England in 1066, who came from Normandy, France, made England’s official language French for the next 300 years but uneducated people continued to speak English.
England broke apart from Normandy in 1204 causing more people to speak English but Parliament continued to use French until 1489.
When French was the official language in England words like celestial, equestrian, masculine, and feminine were developed in modern day English.
English was diffused because of England’s colonies.
England colonies moved to North America in the 17th century such as Jamestown, Virginia, and Plymouth, Massachusetts.
British also took control of Ireland in the 17th century, south Asia mid-18th century, south Pacific, late 18-19th century, and southern and eastern Asia, in the 19th century.
The US diffused English to the Philippines which is one of their official languages.
More English words come from Romance languages instead of Germanic languages even though it is in the Germanic branch.
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The most important language for international communication is English.
English helps spread popular culture, science, and international trade but using English can cause less use of other foreign languages.
People of different languages use a *lingua franca* to communicate.
Smaller languages learn English to be part of the global economy and culture.
Some countries require children to learn English rather than 500 million English speakers learning that smaller language.
90% of European students learn English.
ASL is also a lingua franca.
English, Swahili, Hindi, Indonesian, and Russian are lingua franca languages that countries use even if that language isn’t known by many people there.
Many Americans don’t learn another language because they think they don’t need to because English is spoken a lot in different place.
Not knowing other languages can cause a disrupt in American business.
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½ of Internet content is in English, but now it is ¼ .
The US had a head start in making Internet available to US citizens.
English is still the “leader of the Internet because it created www (World Wide Web) even though some countries don’t have a w or something similar in their language.
The ICANN (US-Based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) gives domain names like com, edu, fr (France), and jp (Japan).
Chinese could be the next lingua franca because their symbols have more meaning making the language maybe more efficient.
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There are *official languages* and *working languages*. Some schools only allow using the official language.
United Nations has 6 official languages including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
The European has 24 official and working languages including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltose, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenia, Spanish, and Swedish.
English is the official language in 56 countries however that doesn’t include the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australia, which are all dominant English speaking countries.
New languages can be created by mixing them with English.
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French is the official language in 29 countries and it was the old lingua franca.
Spanglish is most commonly used by Hispanics in the US to make Spanish words more simple.
The D in Denglish stands for Deutsch.
Many people who are learning a new language use a *pidgin language* which is just a simplified form.
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Dialect is just a different way of using a language.
Generally, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another.
When people migrate, dialects develop and change.
An example of dialect is how people in Britain talk compared to people in the US.
American English developed from British English.
The reason why American English has different vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation is because of the lack of spatial interaction with British England in the 18th/19th century.
American English has a different vocabulary because the colonists were discovering new things in America.
Different forms of English use different words for things.
Since colonists in America could only communicate with England in written form, their pronunciation changed.
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Noah Webster, creator of the dictionary, changed some spelling to create a “new” language for the newly independent America.
There can be regional dialects in a country.
One dialect is the *standard language*.
RP was mainly spoken by people of high class but eventually diffused to the common folk.
The 3 main regional dialects in the UK are Northern, Midland, and Southern.
Dialects can shift due to migration.
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Since dialects are different they have *isoglosses* or boundaries.
The US has 4 major regional dialects including North, Midland, South, and West that can be divided into subdialects.
The North shares dropping the /r/ sound with people in south England.
Half of the south came from southeastern England and is not very diverse.
Midland is very diverse with migration coming from north England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden.
The diffusion of US dialects comes from the colonization to the west.
ASL was created by Thomas Gallaudet at the American School of Deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817.
Around 0.5 million Americans know ASL.
Appalachian dialect is a sign of poor education because it’s not very proper.
Some Appalachian residents are *bidialect*.
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Africans Americans have an English dialect.
Some slaves would speak a different dialect to each other so their masters could not understand them.
*AAVE* is used by African Americans.
Some think AAVE is a sign of poor education while others think it is a sign of preserving their culture.
Mass media helps with the diffusion of words.
French creole in Haiti, Papiamento (creolized Spanish) in the Netherlands Antilles (West Indies) and Portuguese creole in the Cape Verde Islands of the African coast are all *creolized languages*
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Migration and other globalization processes has resulted in suppression of dialect.
A desire for more local cultural identity has made some dialects turn into languages.
*Mutual Intelligibility* differentiates if something is a different language or a different dialect.
Dialects are mutually intelligible, languages are not.
The Romance Branch is an example of having difficulties between if something is a language or dialect.
Catalan, a separate language now, used to be a dialect of Spanish but separated after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Catalan is the official language of Andorra and the Catalonia Province of Spain near the Pyrenees mountains.
Around 4 million people speak Catalan.
Balear, spoken in the Balearic Islands, is a dialect of Catalan.
Valencian, spoken by and in Valencia, is considered a dialect by some and a language by others.
Galician, spoken in northwestern Spain and northeast Portugal, is known as a dialect of Portuguese and it’s own language.
The Republic of Moldova’s (Present Day Moldovan) official language is Romania they tried changing the name to Moldova.
The languages Lombard (spoken by 3.9 million), Napoletano-Calabrese (spoken by 5.7 million), Piemontese (spoken by 1.6 million), Sicilian (spoken by 4.3 million), and the Venetian (spoken by 3.9 million), all used to be considered dialects of Italian.
Occitan (spoken by 2 million) in southern France and surrounding countries teach Occitan and French in schools.
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Governments make official or standard languages to promote cultural unity.
Francien is France’s standard language because it’s spoken in Paris. This helped eliminate smaller dialects.
The Spanish language is different in Latin America then in Spain.
Spanish Royal Academy published the dictionary in 1992 with hundreds of words for Spanish dialects in Latin America.
In 1944, Brazil, Portugal, and Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa agreed to create a standard written way of Portuguese to unify the language.
The “new” written language eliminated characters and added thousands of words related to Brazil almost standardizing Brazil’s version of Portuguese.
Language can add thing depending on the gender of something like ending to verbs, characters, and more.
Austronesian, Turkic, and Uralic are non-gender language families meaning the gender of something doesn’t affect the grammar of the language.
The common Indo-European languages all specify the male and female nouns and verbs, excluding English.
Women tend to use words that are more polite and calm and men tend to use more hostile words
You can 90% of the time tell if someone is a male or female by their word choice.
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Having multiple languages in one place can be a centripetal or centrifugal force.
Southern Belgium (the Walloons) speak French and northern Belgium (the Flemings) speak Flemish, a Dutch dialect.
The Flemings and Walloons are economically and politically different.
The Flemings want to be an independent country even though they control their region of Belgium.
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Niger, Africa’s most populated country, has 529 languages. The north is primarily Muslim and the south is primarily Christian.
There is a lot of tension for the Nigerian regions.
11 languages from the Niger-Congo language family have 1 million or more speakers in Nigeria.
French, Canada’s official language with English, is mainly spoken in the Providence of Quebec.
20% of Canadian’s speak French.
Quebec makes knowing French almost mandatory because the local people speak it and there are many signs in French.
Montreal, in Quebec, is linguistically mixed.
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2,346 (UN established) to 2,447 (Ethnologue established) languages are endangered.
Age distribution is more important than the number of speakers to determine if a language is endangered.
North America, Latin America, and the South Pacific have the most amount of dying languages.
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English is commonly used in Australia and New Zealand.
Australia and New Zealand are prominent in saving their indigenous languages.
Australia has 211 indigenous languages.
Immigrants generally must know English to move to Australia.
Maori, spoken by 14% of New Zealand and an official language with English and sign language, is a threatened language because most people who know it are over 50 years old.
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*Isolated languages* are created with limited interaction.
Hadza and Sandawe is Africa, Burushaski, Korean, and Poraik (Sulung) in Asia, Basque in Europe, Mapudungun in South America are the only sustainable isolated languages.
Basque has no link to Indo-European, even though it is spoken in the area.
The isolation of living in the Pyrenees Mountains helps preserve Basque and their culture.
Icelandic has changed less than any other language in the Germanic Branch. Norweigns, from Norway, colonized Iceland.
When people migrate, language develops but since Norwegians didn’t have much to communicate, the language didn’t change much.
Isolated languages can be changed to belong in a small language family.
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228 (UN established) to 367 (Ethnologue established) languages have become *extinct languages* since 1950.
Liv and Clallam are examples of extinct languages.
Globalization causes loss of languages.
Many languages on the US’s Western coast are extinct.
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The UN and the EN try to preserve the indigenous languages.
Celtic was spoken in Germany, France, northern Italy, and the British Isles 2,000 years ago.
Celtic, spoken in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Brittany, France, is broken into Goidelic (Gaelic) and Brythonic groups.
Welsh, a Gaelic language found in Wales, has been the dominant language since the 19th century and is the official language there.
There are 530,000 Welsh speakers in Wales (23% of Wales) and 150,000 in England.
Welsh is used a lot in Wales but 73% still don’t speak Welsh.
Cornish, a Gaelic, Celtic language, died in 1777 and revived in the 20th century.
577 people in the UK know Cornish and it is taught in grade schools.
Breton, spoken in Brittany, France, is endangered by 15,000 students learn Breton in schools.
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Goidelic originated in Ireland.
Irish is the official language of Ireland along side English.
Irish is a Goidelic, Celtic language.
Irish is spoken by 1.4 million people in Ireland.
Scottish Gaelic, spoken in northern Scotland by 59,000 (1% of Scotland’s population) is different than Scots, spoken in southern Scotland by 1.6 million people.
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Hebrew is used mainly for religious factors back in the day.
Hebrew is not the only official language of Israel after Arabic was removed a while back.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda created 4,000 Hebrew words and the Hebrew dictionary to help modernize Hebrew.
Mgamia, an extinct language in Miami, is now reawakening.
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“Kora Aka” is a new language spoken by 1,500 in northeastern India. It is in the Tiebeto-Burman branch and the Sino-Tibetan family.
Warlpiri Rampaku (Light Warlpiri) is spoken by 350 in north Australia and is a new language.