2. Cultural Differences:
Language

4. Language
Main means by which learned belief systems, customs, and skills pass from one generation to the next
a set of sounds, combinations of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication.

5. Language Defined
Organized system of spoken words by which people communicate with one another with mutual comprehension (Getis, 1985).
Languages subtly gradate one to another. Dialects and other regional differences may eventually lead to incomprehensibility - a new language.
Linguists are scientists who study languages…They think that humans first began communicating through spoken sounds as recently as tens of thousands of years ago

6. Language Terms
Standard language-an official language sustained by the state in the form of state examination for teachers, civil servants and others.
Example: The standard language of Spain is Spanish
Language family-a group of languages descended from a single, earlier tongue.
All of the languages spoken today can be grouped into about 15 families of language. Example: Indo European Language Family
Language Branch = A collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago
Example: Within the Indo-European language family, a branch is Latin
Language group= Collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin.
Example: Spanish, Italian and French
Language-a means of communicating ideas or feelings by means of a conventionalized system of signs, gestures, marks or articulate vocal sounds. In short, communication is symbolic, based on commonly understood meanings or signs.
Language is the heart of culture and a matter of cultural identity.
Standard language is the language of the capital city.
Dialect may be regional or by class-a change in the vocabulary, pronunciation, rhythm and the speed at which a language is spoken. There is still mutually comprehension among dialects of the same language.
Language families have a shared, but distant common origin.
Language subfamilies-have more in common since they split from each other more recently.
Language groups are further divisions of language subfamilies.

8. World Language Families

9. Languages and Language Families

10. Language as Element of Cultural Diversity
6000+ Languages spoken today, not including dialects
1500+ Spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa alone
400+ in New Guinea alone
100+ in Europe
However, this diversity is diminishing:
2000+ Threatened or Endangered Languages

11. Spoken Languages - Origins? Evidence? - Competitive Value for Culture?
Roots of Language
Spoken Languages - Origins? Evidence? - Competitive Value for Culture?
Written Languages - Value for Culture? - Sumerian 3000 B.C., Mesopotamia (Iraq) - Soon also the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites. - Libraries established by 2500 B.C. (more than 200,000 of the tablets have been preserved. - Connection to Neolithic Revolution?

12. Origin & Diffusion of Languages
Mother Tongue-the first language spoken by Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago.
Deep reconstruction-by studying sound shifts, linguists try to re-create an extinct language.
Language divergence-the differentiation that takes place over time and distance.
Language convergence-when long isolated languages make contact through diffusion.
Language replacement-traditional languages of small groups of less advanced people were replaced or greatly modified by an invading tongue.
Linguists can find linkages among languages by examining sound shifts – a slight change in a word across languages over time.
Sound shifts occur as languages change over time and space. Hard consonants tend to soften over time such as – v and t in the German word vater softened into vader in Dutch and father in English. These shifts are referred to by linguists as “Grimm’s law”.
English linguist, William Jones studied ancient Sanskrit in South Asia and first noticed the resemblance to ancient Greek and Latin.
The Grimm Brothers of late 19th century Germany collected and wrote fairy tales from the German oral tradition. They suggested that sound shifts could be used to scientifically prove the relationship between languages.

13. An example of sound shift:
Latin for milk is lacte
Italian is latta
Spanish is leche
French is lait
Another example of
sound shift is:
German vater
Dutch vader
English father
Still another example is
Latin for eight is octo
Spanish is ocho
French is huit
Picture at right is the Via Appia at Casal Rotondo outside of Rome-built by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus to join Rome to Capua and Brindisi in the South around 312 BC.
Latin is the ancient ancestor of most of the Western European languages spoken today, especially the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

14. How are Languages Formed?
Language divergence –
when a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of a language breaks the language into dialects and then new languages.
Language convergence –
when peoples with different languages have consistent spatial interaction and their languages collapse into one.
Mutual Intelligibility- means two people can understand each other when speaking.
Problems:
Cannot measure mutual intelligibility
Many “languages” fail the test of mutual intelligibility
Standard languages and governments impact what is a “language” and what is a “dialect”

15. How do Languages Diffuse?
human interaction-2,000 years ago-Han China, Roman Empire-spread languages over vast empires
print distribution-Gutenberg’s movable type printing press (1452-first Gutenberg Bible) helped to diffuse, standardize & stabilize European languages
Migration-ancient & more recent migration from 16th century to now diffused languages e.g. Spanish, Portuguese, English & French
Trade-encouraged the spread of goods & languages
Rise of nation-states-stabilized & standardized languages
Colonialism-mercantilism & colonies spread European languages in the Americas, Africa & Asia

16. Language Types
About 6000 languages are spoken today

17. Language Divisions Language Families Language Branches Language Groups
Languages
Dialects
Accents

18. Indo-European Language Branches
Non-Indo-European Language Families and Branches

19. Language Families Indo-European: largest and most widespread family
About 50% of the world
Spoken on all continents
Europe, Russia, N&S America, Australia

20. The Indo-European family represents about 1
The Indo-European family represents about 1.6 billion people and includes most of the languages of Europe and northern India, Australia, the United States, and parts of South America. Seeded around the world by Colonialism, this family sprang from a tongue spoken on the Russian steppes approx years ago. This influence continues to grow with widespread adoption of English as a second language.

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

22. Indo-European is the largest and most widespread language family.

23. Indo – European Languages

24. Indo –European Languages

25. The vocabulary of a ancient language can reveal its cultural hearth.
The Indo-European branches of the language tree at right illustrates the concept of language divergence.
August Schleicher was the first to compare the world’s language families to the branches of a tree.
For example linguists know that the origin of the Proto-Indo-European language family was somewhere north of the Black Sea in the steppes of the Ukraine or Russia. The people used horses and had the wheel and traded widely over 5,000 years ago.

26. Postulated diffusion of an Indo-European proto-language

27. The approximate timing of the westward dispersal of the
Indo-European languages.

28. Renfrew Hypothesis
British scholar Colin Renfrew proposed 3 hearth areas near the Fertile Crescent.
Renfrew hypothesis claims that Anatolia was the source of Europe’s Indo-European languages, from the western Fertile Crescent North African & Arabic languages, from the eastern Fertile Crescent the languages of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan & India
Michael Oppenheimer claims that Indo-European languages originated in India over 50,000 years ago

30. Languages of Europe Dominated by Indo-European. Subfamilies include:
Germanic
Romance
Slavic
Celtic
There is a high correlation between languages and political organization.
Pockets of Ural-Altaic
Germanic (Northwest and Central Europe) includes-English, German, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish
Romance( South and Southwest Europe) includes-French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian. (derived from Latin the old Roman tongue hence the name Romance.
Slavic-(Eastern Europe) Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian and Bulgarian
Celtic-(Western margins) the old language that dominated Europe, but was pushed to the periphery by invasions-Breton, Welsh and Gaelic of Ireland and Scotland.
Anomalies include-Pockets of Ural-Altaic such as Magyar in Hungary, Finnish and Estonian-spread into Europe about 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Greek in Greece, Euskara in Basque area of Spain and France.

31. Indo-European Language Family - Germanic Branch
West Germanic
English (514 million)
German (128)
Dutch (21)
North Germanic
Danish (5)
Norwegian (5)
Swedish (9)

32. Germanic Branch - English
Diffused throughout the world by hundreds of years of British colonialism. Brought to New World by British colonies in 1600s. Has become an important global lingua franca (A Language of international communication).

33. Development of English
Germanic Tribes (Germany/Denmanrk)
Jutes
Angles
Saxons
Vikings (Norway)
9th - 11th Centuries
Normans (French)
Battle of Hastings, 1066
French was official language for 150 years.

34. Development of English - Adopted Words
Germanic Tribes (Germany/Denmark)
kindergarten, angst, noodle, pretzel
Vikings (Norway)
take, they, reindeer, window
Normans (French)
renaissance, mansion, village, guardian

35. London, England

36. London, England
While English is spoken in many parts of the world, all English words are not mutually intelligible.
This London tube (subway) sign say that anyone performing there (eg singing or playing for money) is subject to a fine of subsection.
Are tubes, subway, and busking dialect words?

37. Indo-European Family - Romance Branch
The Roman Empire, at its height in 2nd century A.D., extinguished many local languages. After the fall of Rome in the 5th century, communication declined and languages evolved again.
Literature was all written in Latin until the 13th and 14th centuries.
Dante Alighieri’s 1314 Inferno written in vulgar latin (Florentine).

38. Indo-European Language Family - Romance Branch
Like English these languages have been spread by Colonialism.
Spanish (425 million)
Portuguese (194) most in Brazil
French (129)
Italian (62)
Romanian (26)

40. Sino-Tibetan Language Family (approx 25 %)
Branches:
Sinitic Mandarin Cantonese
Austro-Thai Thai, Hmong
Tibeto-Burman Burmese
Chinese languages based on 420 one syllable words with meaning infered from context and tone.

41. The most widely spoken Sino-Tibetan language is Chinese, with over 1 billion speakers.
This family includes eight mutually unintelligible Chinese languages, often mistakenly called dialects. The Chinese government promotes the standard use of Mandarin.

42. Languages of China Chinese has the most speakers of any language.
It is one of the world’s oldest languages spoken by the greatest contiguous population on Earth.
Southern China-the most variety and dialects-most are mutually unintelligible.
Some scholars argue that for this reason-it is not one language, but several.
Mandarin-the dominate language of the North spoken by 700 million including Beijing.
Wu is next with 100 million speakers in Shanghai area.
Yue-or Cantonese is spoken by 70 million in the SE.
Pinyin is a system of phonetically spelling Chinese characters as spoken in Mandarin in the Latin alphabet.

44. Languages of China
Note the complexity of the language map in the southern part of China.
Why? Proximity to many other lands across the water and other cultures to the south?

45. The languages of Eurasia are classified as members of either the Uralic or Altaic language families, which include over 70 related languages. Also found in Asia are three further groups—the Austro-Asiatic languages, spoken by 45 million people in South East Asian countries, and the Dravidian family, which includes the main languages of India and Sri Lanka. The Austronesian (formerly known as Malayo-Polynesian) language family is the main language grouping of the Pacific, spoken from Madagascar to Easter Island and Hawaii.
Uralic: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are safeguarded by their status as national languages. Other Uralic languages have declined in the past 100 years, many crowded out by Russian.
Altaic: Some linguists think Mongolian, Tungusic, and Turkic languages are linked by kinship. Others attribute similarities to linguistic borrowing between traditionally nomadic peoples.
Austro-Asiatic: Now distributed from Vietnam to India, this family’s languages may once have dominated most of SE Asia.
Dravidian: Pockets of these language speakers live in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, but most are found in southern India, where linguistic independence movements in the 1950’s led to the birth of several language-based states, such as Andhra Pradesh, home of Telugu.
Austronesian: Island-hopping seafarers spread these languages across the Pacific and Indian Oceans from Hawaii to Madagascar. More than 1200 languages remain-about a hundred on the tiny Pacific islands of Vanuatu alone. Maori Hello:

46. Languages of India
India had 4 language families with the largest being Indo-European and Dravidian.
There are 15 major languages-all but 4 are Indo-European.
Over 1,600 lesser languages.
The largest Indo-European language is Hindi
Largest Dravidian tongue is Telugu.
Of India’s 1 billion people most speak either an Indo-European or a Dravidian language.
Notice that the Dravidian language family is confined to the south which resulted from the Aryan invasion of Indo-European speakers in ancient times. Northern India is predominantly Indo-European with the largest group being Hindi.
There are 15 major languages-all but 4 are Indo-European, but 1,600 minor languages, some spoken by only a few thousand.
Telagu, the largest Dravidian language is concentrated in the province of Andra Pradesh.
Tamil is spoken by 75 million, mostly in Tamil Nadu. There are also Tamil speakers on the island nation of Sri Lanka.
India’s federal government divisions closely follow the linguistic isoglosses (lines that divides linguistic features or groups).

47. South Asian Languages & 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.

48. Afro-Asiatic Language Family
Main Branch:
Semitic
Arabic (256)
Language of the Koran; spread by Islamic Faith and Islamic (Ottoman) Empires
Hebrew (5)
Language of the old Testament (with Aramaic); completely revived from near extinction in Israel, 1948.

49. LANGUAGES OF AFRICA
There are 1,000 spoken languages in Africa and many are unwritten.
There are 4 major indigenous language families;
Afro-Asiatic of N. Africa
Nilo-Saharan
Niger-Congo
Khosian
Largest ethnic groups are associated with a language.
Afro-Asiatic of North Africa includes Somali, Amharic and Tuareg
Nilo-Saharan includes Dinka, Turkana and Nuer in East Africa
Niger-Congo-the largest family includes Hausa, Yoruba, Zulu, Swahili and Kikuyu. The largest sub-family is Bantu spoken near and south of the Equator. Bantu like Celtic in Europe was once the dominant language of the continent.
Khoisan is a small language family spoken by the Bushmen of the Kalahari-noted for distinctive “clicking” vocalizations.
The largest ethnic groups are associated with certain dominant languages such as Hausa, Yoruba and Zulu.
Attempts to consolidate ethnic groups across boundaries and the struggle for power between groups has been a major cause of conflict

50. Swahili: Where are you going?
African languages are grouped into four families: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan, and Afro-Asiatic.
Niger-Congo: With more than 1400 languages – almost one-fourth of the world’s total – Niger-Congo is one of the largest language families. It includes Swahili, used by 35 million East Africans as a lingua franca.
Swahili: Where are you going?
Nilo-Saharan: About 200 Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by ethnic minorities in their home countries. Only Dongolawi, a Nubian language of the southern Nile in Sudan, has a long written record.
Khoisan: Famous for clicking sounds, Africa’s Khoisan languages may be the continent’s oldest. Several have vanished; most have fewer than a thousand speakers.
Afro-Asiatic: The languages of ancient Babylon, Assyria, Egypt and Palestine belonged to this family. Still thriving, the largest living Afro-Asiatic language, Arabic, spreads in tandem with Islam.
Arabic: يولد جميع الناس أحراراً متساوين في الكرامة والحقوق. وقد وهبوا عقلاً وضميراً وعليهم ان يعامل بعضهم بعضاً بروح اﻹخاء
Hebrew:

51. NIGER-CONGO DIFFUSION
proto-Bantu peoples originated in Cameroon-Nigeria
They spread throughout southern Africa AD
Bantu peoples were agriculturalists who used metal tools
Khoisan peoples were hunter-gatherers and were no match for the Bantu.
Pygmies adopted Bantu tongue and retreated to forest
Hottentots and Bushmen retained the clicks of Khoisan languages