More on language……….

Language is a hallmark of cultural diversity. It's frequently defended as a symbol of cultural identity which helps groups distinguish themselves from other groups. It's a matter of pride. Languages vary in importance. Importance can mean the number of people who speak a particular language. More than half of the people on Earth speak just eight languages.

Language diffusion Tracing back language diffusion –Sound shifts: –E.g.: vater - vader - father = represents a long period of westward divergence Diffusion through: -colonization -conquest -religious conversion

Expansion diffusion – migration and conquest English of UK, America, Australia, South Africa, South Asia

Modern languages Language and regional identity (dialects) Language as political instrument (e.g. the media shaping our vocabulary) Multilingual states –Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, etc. Minority languages Toponomy: systematic study of place names

Physical barriers Language divergence: language differentiation over time and space Language convergence: languages becoming more similar over time and space. Language replacement: loss of traditional and native languages There are extinct languages and revived languages.

Language Vocabulary Vernacular - The everyday language of the people in a country or region, as distinct from official or formal language. Ideograms - The system of writing used in China and other East Asian countries in which each symbol represents an idea or concept rather than a specific sound, as is the case with letters in English. Isogloss - A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate. –

Spanglish – flow from Spanish to English, but new words are often invented Creole language – created by mixing the colonizers language and that of the indigenous people. Pidgin language -A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca, used for communications among speakers of two different languages. – Trade language - A language used between native speakers of different languages to allow them to communicate so that they can trade with each other. (example – Swahili – East Africa)

Dialect: a regional variation of a language Standard language – dialect that is widely established and widely recognized as the most acceptable for govt, business, ed. and mass communication

Nearly 1,000 languages and thousands of dialects have been identified Indo European, Sino- Tibetan, and African language families No one knows how many languages exist in Africa. Afro-Asiatic – Arabic Nilo-Saharan – Sahel Sub Saharan Africa speak a Niger-Congo language family

Issues Nigeria has to deal with include a North/South divide on religion and a large number of tribes and languages.

While Hindi is the major language of India, there are hundreds of regional languages.

Mandarin is by far the dominant language of China, but again, there are many regional lnaguages.

Where would this be?

Theories regarding the diffusion of the Indo-European language.

The linguistic diversity of the Earth is shrinking.. It's estimated that in pre -history humans spoke 10,000 and 15,000 languages.. Of those 6000 remaining between 20% and 50% are not being passed on to children and are effectively dead. It's estimated that in 100 years there will be only 600 of the current 6000 languages still in use. This will create more “extinct” languages. So where did the Proto-IndoEuropean language originate? Let's look at the development of the Indo-European Languages. How do linguists do it? In the history of Homo sapiens, the first language spoken was likely 200,000 years ago. How do we try to reconstruct the relationships among languages today?

The homeland is believed to be somewhere north of the Black Sea in the steppe land of present-day Ukraine and Russia. The time is about 5000 years ago, and judging from the words in the reconstructed vocabulary those people used horses, had developed the wheel, and practiced far ranging trade, especially by horseback. The logical conclusion is the language was spread by a fairly aggressive people on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion of language. Kurgan Conquest Theory

Agricultural hearth theory

AGRICULTURAL THEORY 2000 years before the Kurgans in eastern Anatolia, a part of present-day Turkey. DRAWBACKS Anatolia is not an ideal place for farming and there's no strong archeological evidence for an agricultural society. Maybe truth in both hypotheses. If Anatolia was the source, it could have spread both westward across southern Europe and in the broad arc around the Caspian. Belief that it originated in Anatolia and spread with agricultural practices westward to Greece, then to Italy to the Mediterranean coast of France and Spain and Portugal.

Toponomy – the study of place names. Descriptive names: Rocky Mountains Associative names: Mills Valley, CA Incident names: Battle Creek, MI Possessive names: Johnson City, TX Commemorative San Francisco Commendatory Paradise Valley, AZ Folk-etymology Academia, PA Manufactured Truth or Consequences, NM

Language can elicit strong passions. When many countries gained their independence from colonial masters, they changed the names given to locations by their colonizers (usually European.) Upper Volta Gold Coast Northern and Southern Rhodesia Ceylon Belgian Congo Burma Siam Falklands Cote d I’voire Burkina Faso Ghana Zambia and Zimbabwe Sri Lanka Congo, Zaire Myanmar Thailand Malvinas Ivory Coast

Changing names (cont) Leopoldville Salisbury Leningrad Stalingrad Bombay Calcutta Kinshasa Harrare St. Petersburg Volgograd Mumbai Kolkatta

And the winner of the most unique city name in America is…..

Mistake names are often rooted in cultural or historical errors. The southern tip of South America was actually named Cape Hoorn by the Dutch, after a town in Holland. The English interpreted this into Cape Horn

The lingua franca of the business world?

If you have any doubts about the lingua Franca of the world, what language must all pilots and control personnel know?