Section 1
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what portion (number or percent) of the world's languages are spoken by the 14 percent on the other end of the spectrum, speakers whose languages are considered "small"?
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Section 1
(50 cards)
what portion (number or percent) of the world's languages are spoken by the 14 percent on the other end of the spectrum, speakers whose languages are considered "small"?
14% on other end of spectrum speak 3500 languages which is half of the world's languages
Language vs. Dialect
-based from concepts of mutual intelligibility or unintelligibility -if they can't communicate effectively, different language - if they can communicate but find other's speech a little different, different dialect
correct written symbols for IPA
word: 'paper' letter: <p> phoneme: /p/ allophone [p'eper]
Gender on Dialect
In general, women have been consistently found in research to use more educated or "proper" speech than men, even within the same social class.
Dialects in Reality: false language (2)
while normally considered a dialectal difference, Russian and Ukraine are named different languages. This is where the joke "a dialect with an army and navy behind it" comes from meaning they went to war to be a different language. - same with Serbo-Croatian to Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin
Dialects in Reality: false language (1)
all Scandinavian (North Germanic) languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and even Icelandic have some degree of mutual intelligibility because they all come from Old Norse, and aren't close enough to be considered dialects (debatable). Even if they were, for political reasons and national pride, they would demand to be known as separate languages.
Why Spelling isn't super important
if has the correct first and last letter with close to the same spelling, it is still readable
phonetics
the study of phonemes, which are the smallest units of speech that can distinguish one word from another.
Resurgence of Galician & Basque
Galician now: 2.5 mil in Northwestern Spain Basque: over half a million in North central Spain
Language Metaphorical terminology
-tree -graphs -pictures
Stats of Mandarin Chinese
approximately 1 billion speakers (one language spoken by 14 percent of world's population)
14 % of world's languages spoken by
0.09 percent of the world's population, for an average of only 6,500 speakers per language: equivalent to 10 distinct languages in Conway
Sexual Orientation, Class, and Gender for "tú"
Class: tú is often an upper class feature, while vos is lower class (not in Argentina) Gender: tú is often used more by women, vos by men (more aggressive) Sexual orientation: in much of Guatemala and Costa Rica and in parts of Colombia, the use of tú among men is used to express one's homosexuality, while vos is used by heterosexuals (foreigners not held to this standard)
some linguists estimate that as many as ____ percent of languages spoken presently will disappear over the next century
90%
allophones
a slight change in phonemes that don't create different words like /'mεtl/ vs. ['mεɾl]
Catalán, Galician, and Basque
were all in decline due to the Spanish-only policies of the Franco regime in Spain (1939-1975). It wasn't just that they couldn't be taught in school or used in government; it was forbidden to speak them at all, which means they were only spoken in the home. -then, Franco died
Dialect Continua Examples
1) Northern Spain(ish) with Portugal to France/Germany 2) "Continental West Germanic" includes all varieties of : -High German spoken in German speaking parts of Switzerland, Austria, and southern parts of Germany -AND Middle German and Low German spoken in certain cities -makes traveling more difficult for communicating
Is language distribution even around the globe, geographically speaking?
NOPE. English is lingua-franca.
complexity example
while English has a less complex past tense than Spanish, Spanish has less pronunciation rules compared to English
Factors of Dialectology
NOT just geographical; can be based on social variables such as class/education, gender, even sexual orientation (sociolinguistics)
Class/Education (SES) on Dialect
The dialect of two Spanish-speaking college professors, one in Mexico City and one in Santiago, Chile, 5,000 miles apart, is likely to be more similar than that of either of them and a poor day laborer who lives in the slums 5 miles away.
Hebrew
Hebrew died out in Palestine in about 200 A.D. and was replaced by Aramaic, a language of the same family (Semitic). Hebrew was dead as a spoken native language for some 1700 years (though its use continued in written form for religious purposes). It was revived at the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries and grew in its usage after WWI and especially in WWII in what today is the modern state of Israel, where it is spoken by over 7 million people, 5 million of whom speak it as their native tongue. This success is unparalleled. - new state survived by Holocaust (nationalism)
Low German
(in the North, without the mountains) - Dutch is similar
Language Complexity
Besides being subjective, even an objective evaluation of one aspect of a language might ignore other aspects. - language has so many components! - depends on native language to learn the second
German provides both phenomena: false dialect and false language difference
phenomena= a so-called language that really constitutes a dialect and an apparent dialect which is really another language
Dialect Continuum
=range of dialects spoken across geographical area; gradual changes - think of playing telephone
minimal pairs
if one phoneme difference distinguishes between words like bat/vat or pit/pot
Example of many diverse languages in a small area
New Guinea and surrounding islands feature approximately 1,000 distinct languages among only 6.5 million people
Catalán, Galician, and Basque have language revival in common, but in what other ways do they have things in common or not in common?
-part of Euskera - all morbund - how they revived; Catalan spoken by more -different geography
how stress is noted in transcription
English: ' before syllable Spanish: 'over letter (tilde)
Dialects in Reality: false dialect
Different varieties of Chinese are often called dialects even though they are not mutually intelligible. These "dialects" can be as different as the languages on each branch of the Indo-European.
phonology
the general study of language sounds (includes phonemics and phonetics).
How many languages are there?
about 7,000
Geography on Dialect: Spanish Example
1. ¿Cómo estás, tú? (Spain, Mexico, Peru, most of many other countries) [¿Qué piensas, tú? ] 2. ¿Cómo estás, vos? (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia) [¿Qué pensás, vos? ]
Moribund Examples
1. Welsh 2. Catalán 3. Galician 4. Basque 5. Navajo 6. Caddos (2-4 are Euskera)
Language families
We might more usefully say that Indo-European is the family, that there is a Germanic branch (or subfamily), and that this branch has sub-branches such as East and West Germanic, each with individual languages.
Cornish
last monolingual native speaker was reportedly a woman who died in 1676, while the last native speaker who also spoke English was a woman who died almost exactly 100 years later, in 1777. While this language has been revived (somewhat), there are disputes over which variety to use, and the 2,000 or so speakers are not native speakers, having learned it in school - rather tenuous.
Example of one common language over a large area
Mandarin Chinese
phonemics
the study of phonemes, which are the smallest units of speech that can distinguish one word from another.
if each language had the same number of speakers, what would the average be per speaker?
if 7 billion people, 100,000 languages per person - lots of challenges: native, 2nd language, job of linguists, etc.
Language Loss Reasons
1. genocide, disease 2. improved communities, transportation, migration leads to language contact and competition (isolation protects language) 3. when languages come together, the one preferred by the new generation takes majority, wealth, prestige etc. - aka dies with last native speaker
Best Example of Resurgence
Catalán!! -has 10 million speakers in northeastern Spain (area of Barcelona), is the official language of the region and is actively used in government, and which is the language used in half of all college courses in Catalonia.
Language commonality
-verbs, nouns, adjectives - numbers= nouns
three states/conditions of languages
1. Dead (no native speakers) - Cornish 2. Moribund [dying] (native speakers, but no longer being learned by children) -Catalán 3. Living (native speakers and children learning)
Dead Examples
1. Hebrew 2. Cornish
High German
(in the South, with the mountains) - much different than Low German
phonemes
creates an entirely different word with different meaning
Hebrew as a "dead" language
Hebrew, yes, was resurrected, but Latin never really died, rather it evolved in its vulgar form, since Classical Latin (written) was never anyone's everyday language.
Welsh
-on its way to death until put into school curriculums in Wales where children learned to speak better than their parents - never died; just endangered - aka opposite of dying - makes Welsh one of the few Celtic languages currently with a secure footing moving towards half a million speakers
how Hebrew is different from Latin
- Latin has modern official language descendants -Latin (Vulgar Latin) never died! People did not stop speaking it, they just gradually modified how they spoke it. Hebrew did die, meaning the moment came when the children of Hebrew speakers did not learn it anymore
Section 2
(50 cards)
Code switching
makes it hard to account for 2 languages because they come in contact and mix. - Spanglish and Portuñol [Portuguese and Spanish]).
what group is constantly mocked for being monolingual?
English - not necessary to learn more bc its a lingua franca in international business and entertainment, etc
Scandinavia speaks very good
English
Diverse dialects of Germanic that created their own languages
1. German 2. Dutch 3. Danish 4. Norwegian 5. Swedish 6. Icelandic 7. English 8. Afrikaans in South Africa
When did language classification system begin?
18th century (Parsons, Jones), but hinted 2 centuries earlier (Scaliger) - compared features like durable vocab related to pronouns, numbers, body parts, kinship terms to see if they had the same parent or a more distant ancestor - English and German use 'hand' - French, Spanish, and Italian use 'madre'
creole
2nd generation of a language; its a native language
role of phonetics and writing- what is a language?
languages not related phonetically may share all or parts of their writing systems (Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, and even Chinese and some of Japanese). Or, in opposite fashion, languages may be spoken the same but written differently (Serbo-Croatian: Serbian is written in Cyrillic, while Croatian uses the Roman alphabet).
among the most studied languages on Earth?
Indo-European
What are some of the non-Indo-European languages in Europe and India
- Europe (Finno-Ugric languages and Basque) - India (Dravidian languages)
Country with largest population of one language?
China is mainly Mandarin, not very diverse like India
Possible evidence of Kurgan Theory
1. words for artifacts found at archeological sites, and which are thought to be of Kurgan origin, share great similarities across now greatly dispersed Indo-European languages: 'wheel', 'axle', 'yoke' ⃰ 2. The only non-Indo-European language that appears to have Indo-European words, through contact, is Proto-Uralic (Uralic mountains are north of the Pontic steppe). ['porcas' - Latin: porcus; Spanish: 'puerco'; English: 'pork']
Evidentiary problems of Anatolian Theory
besides a lack of physical/linguistic evidence, it is widely accepted that this area was occupied at the same time by non-Indo-European people. (Some linguists think these same people could have later moved to the Kurgan region, thus not contradicting the Kurgan theory.)
'ye'
= 'thee'
How to Elicit
1. get personal info like birthday, name, profession, family, education, hometown 2. transcribe - fill in the blanks - record - look for intonation - similarities -take notes in convo and after listening to recording
The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 'epoch' = /epic/ like era 'incredulity' = disbelief - very modern
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. (1859)
Anatolian theory
original Indo-European people predated the Kurgan culture by 2,000 years (7,000 BC), and lived in Anatolia (modern-Turkey).
"Come here" in German
Kommen sie heir
koiné
a word now used to refer to a common dialect of any language created by contact
Which country is home to the highest number of the world's top 20 languages?
India with 8 of top most popular languages
Most Spoken Non-Native Languages
1. Mandarin 2. English 3. Spanish
Dominant (Kurgan) theory
original Indo-European people and speakers began to spread out, beginning around 5,000 BC, from the Pontic steppe around the area of the ancient Kurgan culture, or of modern eastern Ukraine and southwest Russia.
Internal arbitrariness of language
example: why is a chair a 'chair'? - there is no inherent connection between words and their meanings; they only take meaning through convention - this includes onomonopia words (rooster call in different languages)
Theories with less evidence and support:
Armenaian (Noah's Ark) and "Out of India" hypotheses
Bilingualism/ Multilingualism
- very common in parts of India and Africa - common to speak 3: a local or tribal lang., a regional lang., and a colonial language like English, French, or Dutch
From "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" by John McWhorter
Modern English: "Do you have a horse to sell?" Old English (Anglo-Saxon): Haefst Pu hors to sellenne? Old Norse: Hefir Pu hross at sellja?
Distinction from Spanish and English
Spanish nouns ends with vowels, verbs end with -er, - some Spanish words keep English pronunciation like baseball, fax, software, homerun - add vowel a lot or English takes off vowel like computer, telephone
What else makes English a German language?
- we have vowel changes for different tenses like "drink, drank, drunk" - swim, begin, ring, spring, fling - the phenomena is termed "ablaut" in German - we use Latin roots - 10 base number system - no case systems
potential drawback of family trees,
languages also come into contact without either of them being destroyed. This does not mean they are not changed. They influence each other, but it is better than any other system that has been proposed to make sense of relationships (or the lack thereof) between languages.
English & French as distinct cousin languages bc they have influenced each other
linguists tend to mark the end of Old English and Middle English with the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William the Conqueror and his French-speaking occupiers came from northern France and took over England by winning the battle.
opposite of code switching (1)
many mutually unintelligible languages may become one rudimentary language which is not anyone's native tongue, and then the next generation of speakers does speak it as a native tongue.
External arbitrariness of language example
modern day distribution of English and Greek
polyglot
speaks 5+ languages
linguists cannot accurately predict what will happen with languages
They can often only arrive after the fact and say what did happen, such as the changes from Old English (OE) to Middle English (ME) to Early Modern English (EMnE) to Present-Day English (PDE).
External Arbitrariness
There was nothing in the Germanic dialects that was superior, making one of them destined to spread all over the world. If the Germanic speakers had migrated toward the Mediterranean and the Hellenic speakers had moved farther north and west in Europe, perhaps we would be speaking Greek here today.
English words from French and Spanish
duel and cousin, came into English from the French in the 13th and 14 centuries. English has also borrowed words from other languages, such as Spanish: adobe, aficionado, banana, caldera, desperado [desesperado], guerrilla, machete, peccadillo [pecadillo], rodeo, tobacco [tabaco], vanilla [vainilla], vigilante.
How it's determined if they are related languages
learn culture like Sora in The Linguists 1. body parts with imitation 2. colors 3. numbers
Linguistic Evidence of Kurgan Theory
linguists have reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words such as 'cold', 'winter', 'snow', and 'pine', from northern climes, and those for animals such as 'wolf' and 'bear', but not 'palm', 'olive', 'ocean', 'elephant', or 'camel'.
Percentage of world's population speaking more than 1 language
as much as 50% meaning about 3.5 billion people speak only language
Past Tense -ed ending of English verbs
/t/ walked, blessed, stopped, laughed /d/ pegged, causes, ebbed, loved
pidgin
first generation of a language; no native languages
Which Language Family has the most speakers?
Indo-European
What is the lingua franca for cuisine?
European languages
List of Diphthongs
/aI/ 'light' /aU/ 'mouse' 'boy' /ou/ /eI/ 'hay'
Most geographical evidence of Kurgan Theory
Eastern Europe is the geographical center of the modern Indo-European realm.
Most Spoken Native Languages
1. Mandarin 2. Spanish 3. English
As the Germanic languages were spreading...
Greek remained in the same place (this is largely true even today, though there are some speakers in neighboring Turkey, Albania, etc.). In some ways, Greek even turned inward, as speakers of different Greek dialects come to the port city of Athens to trade, reinforcing the language and creating a common dialect, called a koiné
Proto-Indo-European homeland: where and when?
1. Armenian hypothesis 2. Sogniana hypothesis 3. Kurgan hypothesis 4. Neolithic Creolization hypothesis 5. Out-of-India model 6. Anatolian hypothesis 7. Paleolithic Continuity Theory
How to read language family tree
same branch= sister languages like English or German same part of the tree= cousin languages like English and French
Diphthong definition
when two vowels occupy the same syllable, such as the phonemes /a/ and /i/ in the word 'light' /'lait/.
James Murray
author of Oxford English Dictionary - thought it would be 1875 to 1885 - actually took 1875- 1925
Section 3
(25 cards)