Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?

 Classification of languages  Distribution of language families ◦ Sino-Tibetan language family ◦ Other East and Southeast Asian language families ◦ Afro-Asiatic language family ◦ Altaic and Uralic language families ◦ African language families

 Many different families, made up of different branches and groups and subgroups within them as a result of diffusion and change  Familes: Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Amerindian, Australian, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Eskimo-Aleut, Indo- European, Japanese, Khoisan, Korean, Niger- Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Papuan, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic

Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more than 50 million speakers are named.

Fig. 5-11a: The percentage of world population speaking each of the main language families. Indo-European and Sino- Tibetan together represent almost 75% of the world’s people.

Fig. 5-12: Family trees and estimated numbers of speakers for the main world language families.

 48% of world speakers  Largest family  All continents  Many different branches with groups within each

 Although most of India speak an Indo- European language, the southeastern portion of India is home to the Dravidian language family  This is a barrier amongst many in India- many people, however, have a second language

 2 nd largest family  All languages in China (Sino) and many in Southeast Asia  Branches- Sinetic, Austro-Thai and Tibetan- Burman  The latter two are primarily Thai in Indochina and Burmese in Myanmar (Burma)

 No single Chinese language  Mandarin is the most widely spoken language on earth and spoken by 3/4s of the people in China  Cantonese, Min, Wu, Jinyu, Xiang, Hakka, and Gan are others, but they have a consistent written form  They are based on 420 one syllable sounds  They are used over and over and have to be determined often by context  They can be combined

 Chinese written language is a collection of characters and ideograms- pictural representations rather than characters representing pronunciation like in English  Over 16 percent of China can only read a few

 Isolated Korean peninsula led to their own family  Korean is not written with ideograms but in a system called hankul where each letter represents a sound like in Western languages  Much of their vocabulary, however, comes from Chinese words and some from Japanese

 Isolated Japanese archipelago led to a unique Japanese language family  Japanese literary tradition uses some ideograms but also two systems of phonetic symbols like western languages  The vocabulary is influenced by China in some aspects though

Fig. 5-13: Chinese language ideograms mostly represent concepts rather than sounds. The two basic characters at the top can be built into more complex words.

 Spoken by about 2 percent of the world in Southeast Asia  Vietnamese is the most common and is written with the roman alphabet with diacritical marks above the vowels  Roman Catholic missionaries helped develop the writing system based on phonetics in the 600s

 Spoken by the native inhabitants of Australia, primarily today in the “Outback”  Papuan family originated with the native inhabitants of Papua New Guinea  These emerged from isolation over the years

Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more than 50 million speakers are named.

 This family covers northern Africa and the Arabian world  It includes Arabic and Hebrew as well as a number of smaller groups  This is the world’s 4 th largest family  It has influenced other languages and parts of the world because three of the world’s major religions- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam- originated in the regions where these languages were spoken and their holy books are written in those languages

 This is spoken in central Asia from Turkey to Mongolia, covering many of the “stan” countries  Turkish is the most common and was written with Arabic letters  They created a phonetic language using the Roman alphabet in the early 1900s  Other languages include Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Turkmen  Under the Soviet block years, Russian and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet was ordered used but since 1990 many have started using their own again

 Spoken by some European peoples in Estonia, Finland, and Hungary  The people there speak languages traceable to the peoples around the Ural Mountains over 7000 years ago  Migrants carried it to Europe

 These speakers are concentrated in southwest Asia in Georgia  Georgian is a key language off of it  There are many different dialects

 There are over 1000 languages spoken in Africa and many more dialects  This comes from over 5000 years of interaction among the thousands of cultural groups  Most do not have a written tradition- only 8 are spoken by more than 10 million people  It has been very hard for linguists and anthropologists to document all of them

 This aforementioned family is dominant in the Sahara and north  Arabic and Hebrew are the two most common languages coming out of it  This is the 4 th largest language family

 More than 95 percent of the people in Sub- Saharan Africa speak languages in this family  It has six branches and many smaller, hard to classify languages included  Several million people in Sub-Saharan Africa also speak Indo-European languages from the days of colonization such as Afrikaans, English, Dutch, French, Spanish, or Portuguese (the largest numbers are in South Africa)

 Benue-Congo is the largest branch of this family and includes three languages that are the first languages of at least 10 million people (Yoruba, Igbo, and Shona)  Swahili is another major language, spoken by over 800,000 people  It is spoken as a second language by over 30 million Africans, however  Local languages are used in everyday speech, but Swahili is used to talk to outsiders  It has strong Arabic influences and a written language with extensive literature

 This family is spoken in north-central Africa along the Nile in places and in the Sahara as the name implies  It is divided into six branches even though the languages are only spoken by a few million people  The six branches are Chari-Nile, Fur, Koma, Maba, Saharan, and Songhai  The total number speakers of each language included in each branch is small and localized

Fig. 5-14: The 1000 or more languages of Africa are divided among five main language families, including Austronesian languages in Madagascar.

 Nigeria, a country in western Africa, has over 400 languages spoken by the Nigerians  This can cause problems  Only three have widespread use- ◦ Hausa- an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by about 15% of the pop. In the north by the Hausa and Fulani peoples ◦ Yoruba- a Niger-Congo language spoken by another 15% in the southwest ◦ Igbo is another Niger-Congo language spoken by 14 percent in the south ◦ The other 44 percent use one of the other 490 languages

Fig. 5-15: More than 200 languages are spoken in Nigeria, the largest country in Africa (by population). English, considered neutral, is the official language. Lots of cultural diversity Lots of languages Often disputes between the groups The Ibo in the south tried to secede in the 1960s The Hausa claim discrimination by the Yoruba

 This is concentrated in the southwest, including the Kalahari  It has the distinctive clicking sounds often associated by westerners with Africa  The whites nicknamed this Hottentot

 This is spoken by about 6 percent of the world- most in Indonesia  This is spoken in the islands of Southeast Asia and the island of Madagascar off of the African coast  It covers thousands of islands and so there are lots of distinct languages and dialects- over 700 actively used ones  The most widely used first language is Javanese- 75 million speakers most on the island of Java

Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more than 50 million speakers are named.

 Spoken by the original inhabitants of the Americas  Developed into hundreds of languages and dialects over centuries  Many are threatened with extinction as the Indo-European languages that spread through colonization become dominant

 This family is centered in the arctic regions of North America and part of Asia  They developed in isolation and include many different languages and dialects  Many are threatened by Indo-European dominance and many young people do not learn the languages to pass them on

Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more than 50 million speakers are named.