Chapter 5 Language

The Indo-European Language Family A language family is a collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed long before recorded history. A language branch is a collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago.

Branches of Indo-European Germanic branch (NW Europe & N Amer.) Indo-Iranian branch (South Asia) Balto-Slavic branch (E Europe) Romance branch (SW Europe & S. Amer.) Albanian Armenian Greek Celtic

Germanic Branch of Indo-European A language group is a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary. West Germanic is the group within the Germanic branch of Indo-European to which English belongs.

Indo-European Language Family Fig. 5-5: The main branches of the Indo-European language family include Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian.

Indo-Iranian Branch of Indo-European Indo-European branch w/ most speakers (>1billiion) 100 individual languages Indic Group & Iranian Group 1/3 of Indians use an Indic lang.-Hindi; Pakistanis use Urdu Other lang. fams. In India include Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, and Austro-Asiatic Iranian group languages include Persian or Farsi in Iran, Pathan in Afghanistan and Kurdish These languages are written in Arabic.

South Asian Languages and Language Families Fig. 5-7: Indo-European is the largest of four main language families in South Asia. The country of India has 18 official languages.

Balto-Slavic Branch of Indo-European Slavic was one a single language, but differences developed in the 7th century after migrations to Eastern Europe and years of isolation. East, West, South, and Baltic groups exist. Russian is the most widely-used language of the East Slavic Group It grew in importance with the Soviet Union Then partially caused its break-up Ukrainian and Belorusian are important, too.

Balto-Slavic Branch of Indo-European The most spoken West Slavic language is Polish, followed by Czech and Slovak The two most important South Slavic languages are Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian

Romance Branch of Indo-European The Romance branch includes Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, as well as a number of smaller languages and dialects. It derived from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman soldiers of the empire 2,000 years ago. Time and isolation account for the development of individual languages.

Romance Languages Continued 90% of the speakers of Spanish and Portuguese are outside of those countries. These Romance languages were diffused to the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

Romance Creoles A creole language is defined as a language that results from the mixing of the colonizer’s language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated. French Creole in Haiti and Papiamento (Spanish) in the Netherlands Antilles are examples.