 about 5,000-6,000 different languages spoken in the world today  English is far the most world wide in its distribution  1/4 to 1/3 of the people in the world understand and speak English to some degree Countries in Which English Is an Official or de facto Official Language (red areas)

 about 1/2 of the world's languages are no longer spoken by children  900 native languages spoken by the 5-10 million people of New Guinea  that’s roughly 1/6 of all languages being spoken by far less than 1% of the world's people Video: Last Speaker of "Extinct" Language Found (3:50)

The Most Common Languages in the World LANGUAGE APPROXIMATE NUMBER OF NATIVE SPEAKERS (in the year 2000) COUNTRIES WITH SUBSTANTIAL NUMBERS OF NATIVE SPEAKERS 1. Mandarin Chinese874,000, Hindi (India)366,000, English341,000, Spanish ,000, Bengali (India and Bangladesh) 207,000, Portuguese176,000, Russian 167,000, Japanese125,000, German (standard)100,000, Korean 78,000, French 77,000, Wu Chinese 77,000, Javanese 75,000, Yue Chinese 71,000, Telugu (India) 69,000,000 7

 unique in being a symbolic communication system that is learned instead of biologically inherited  symbols are sounds or things which have meaning given to them by the users  they are abstractions  they are infinitely flexible when combined  Birth of a Language (4:57) Birth of a Language (4:57) Do the following words sound or look like the animal shown here: dog, canis, chien, hund, perro?

 speech is a broad term simply referring to patterned verbal behavior  a language is a set of rules for generating speech  a dialect is a variant of a language  regional dialect  associated with a geographically “isolated” speech community  Boston, Texas, Wisconsin….  social dialect  spoken by a speech community that is merely socially isolated  mostly based on class, ethnicity, gender, age  Black English (or Ebonics)  nushu – females in China used to maintain support networks in their male dominated society

 linguists divide the study of spoken language into two categories 1. phonology is the study of sounds  phoneme  smallest unit of sound that can be altered to change the meaning of a word  do not have meaning by themselves  in English the words gin, kin, pin, sin, tin, and win all have different meaning  they can change the meaning of words

2. grammar is how the sounds are used to make sense  morphology  concerned with how the sounds are combined in order to have meaning (words)  syntax  standardized set of rules that determine how words should be combined to make sense (sentences)  for example-- you, are, and there can be combined in three different ways There you are. You are there. Are you there?

 language is arguably the most important component of culture because most of culture is transmitted through language  young children have the genetic propensity to learn language  Becoming Multilingual  is easier in early childhood than later  linguistic interference  learning a second language can be affected by the patterns of the first language

 communication is far more than speech and writing  paralanguage  other communication methods  messages that can be observed through face to face contact makes it more difficult to lie or to hide emotions  has been suggested that as much as 70% of what we communicate when talking directly with others is through paralanguage

 Forms of paralanguage  kinesics  gestures, expressions, and postures  tone and character of voice  a voice that is high, low, quick, slow, rising, falling, whispering, whining, yelling, or sighing can convey…  proxemics  the distance our bodies are physically apart Japanese avoiding eye contact in a crowd

 cultural use of space  cultural use of time  when people appear for an appointment varies with the custom, social situation, and their relative status Typical North American OfficeTypical Japanese Office

 communicating with clothes/body decorations  communicate status, intentions, and other messages  could even be paint, tattoos, decorative scaring and branding, perfumes, and even body deformation

 human communication process is more complex than it initially seems  much of our messages in face to face contact are transmitted through paralanguage  these auxiliary communication techniques are highly culture bound  communication with people from other societies or ethnic groups is fraught with the danger of misunderstanding if their culture and paralanguage is unknown to you or ignored