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Concourse 2

Comparing languages: Stage 2, language families

family

Answers vary, of course, and it depends on how you count.  Much depends on how you define a language.  (One common but non-technical definition of a language is that it is a dialect with and army and a navy.)

For most purposes a language is defined when only speakers within the group can be mutually comprehended.  Thus, while many Spanish speakers can get the gist of spoken Catalan, Spanish and Catalan are separate languages because they are not fully mutually comprehensible.  This is, of course, a matter of degree.

There are some issues with counting the world's languages and estimates vary from around 6000 to just over 7000.  The issues are:

  1. The border between a language proper and a dialect is fuzzy.  At exactly what point a variety of a language becomes a separate language in its own right is often a decision made on political or social grounds rather than on a purely linguistic basis.  Examples, often cited, are Czech and Slovak or Danish and Norwegian.  In both cases the language pairs are almost entirely mutually comprehensible but political and national boundaries contrive to classify them as separate languages.
  2. On the other hand, within large languages such as English or German there often exist varieties which are not mutually comprehensible but, because of other social and political considerations, these varieties are rarely classified as separate languages.  Politics and the need to maintain cultural or national identity often play a significant role here.
  3. Also for national and political reasons, the numbers of people speaking a minority language may be deliberately underestimated or the very existence of the language may not be recognised.
  4. In some cases a better definition of a language is as a macrolanguage which encompasses a range of mutually unintelligible (or variably intelligible) varieties.  Macrolanguages are often spoken across large areas which are culturally connected.  The Ethnologue (at https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size) lists 14 varieties of Chinese as separate languages and distinguishes 20 varieties of Arabic which in both cases vary in the amount of inter-intelligibility with other varieties.  Malay and the main languages of Pakistan are also sometimes considered as examples of macrolanguages.
  5. Languages die, populations move and people change.  In some cases census data are unreliable and in some, no reliable data at all exist.  Some estimates are that a language is lost forever every 10 or so days.  Half the world's languages have fewer than 5000 speakers and that puts them in a precarious position.  UNESCO estimates that over 2500 of the world's languages are currently endangered.

All that said, however, the number you were looking for is between 4500 and 7000.

Sadly, reducing by one every ten days or so.
The number of languages spoken worldwide has encouraged scholars to look for affinities between them and divide languages into families, groups, sub-families and so on.  These can be helpful data for language teachers because languages in the same families and groups exhibit similarities from which we may be able to make some helpful predictions.

think Question: Where are most languages spoken?  Rank these areas in order of the number of indigenous languages spoken in them and then click here for the right answer.
Pacific | Asia | The Americas | Africa | Europe


Source: SIL International [https://www.sil.org]

Surprised?  Many people are.

Now look at this:

algarve to sicily

Before the rise of politically and culturally homogenous nation states, it would have been possible to walk from the Algarve to Sicily and, providing you travelled slowly and talked a lot on the way with the people you met, you would never notice any change in language.  However, you would have left speaking Algarvian Portuguese and arrived speaking Sicilian Italian.
Nowadays, language borders are usually neatly defined but that's not always the case.

Language has become a political concept as much as it is a linguistic one.  Some declare they speak a separate language from their neighbours to underline how different they are (take Slovak and Czech) and some people will deliberately downplay language differences in order to present a united front and emphasise cultural or political unity.

Here's a couple of maps which are interesting but not of very much practical classroom use unless you want to impress your students by knowing, e.g., that they speak a Nilo-Saharan language or whatever.  This one shows the world's primary language families (i.e., those languages originally spoken in the areas indicated).

primary languagesSource Wikipedia.

And this one shows the modern-day incidence of Indo-European languages (such as English).  The white areas indicate regions where an Indo-European language is not spoken (and that includes Hungary and Finland, incidentally).

indo-european
Source: https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/

It is possible to make some inferences from maps like these because languages in the same groupings will tend to have much in common so if you have taught one speaker of, say, a Romance language (shown on this map as Italic) such as French, you may be assured that speakers of other Romance languages, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Catalan etc., may well exhibit the same kinds of 1st language interference patterns.

Another way of representing the affinities between languages in families is like this.  This focuses only on the western branches of Indo-European but you can see from the map above that Indo-Aryan (sometimes called Indic) and Iranian languages are also Indo-European in origin.

indo-european

We can also illustrate how Proto-Indo European spread from its assumed homeland both west and north and south and east, like this but the map leaves out literally hundreds of modern languages, some widely spoken, although it does provide a taste of the diversity which has developed.
ie


The next Stage concerns a way of classifying languages not by origin or family but by their structural characteristics.
Click here to go to Stage 3.

Index Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 The lesson