Chapter 5

Language

Key Terms

Language – a system of communication through speech

Literary Tradition – a system of written communication

Official language – language used by government for laws.

Where and Why Approach…

Where are different languages used?

Why languages have distinctive distributions?

Key Issue #1

Where are English-Language Speakers Distributed?

Origin, Diffusion, & Dialects of

English

Origin and diffusion of English

English colonies

Origin of English in England

Dialects of English

Dialects in England

Differences between British & American English

Dialects in the United States

English Speaking Countries

Fig. 5-1: English is an official language in 50 countries, including some in which it is not the

most widely spoken language. It is also used and understood in many others.

English Colonies

When England became an imperial power, they migrated

with their language to any colony they established.

English came to America with the establishment of

Jamestown in 1607.

The British also took control of

Ireland in the 17th Century.

South Asia (India) in the mid 18th.

South Pacific in late 18th.

South Africa in the early 19th.

Origins of English in England

Invasion of Germanic tribes – Angles. Jutes and Saxons.

People are called Anglo-Saxons for the larger two tribes.

England comes from the term Angle’s Land.

English differs fro German because of the Norman Invasion

of 1066. The Norman from France made French the official

language, but the common people never learned French.

The mixture of the two language led us to modern English

Invasions of

England 5th - 11th

centuries

Fig. 5-2: The groups that brought what became English to England included Jutes, Angles, Saxons,

and Vikings. The Normans later brought French vocabulary to English.

Dialects of English

Like in all languages English has dialects.

A dialect is a regional variation of a language distinguished by

specific spelling, vocabulary and pronunciation.

A standard language is the dialect that is recognized as the

main language.

British Received Pronunciation is known as the standard in

modern broadcasting.

Old & Middle English Dialects

Fig. 5-3: The main dialect regions of Old English before the Norman invasion persisted to

some extent in the Middle English dialects through the 1400s.

Differences in British and American

English

Why are they different? Distance.

The Atlantic Ocean separated the countries and therefore the

development.

Noah Webster also changed the language because of his

distaste of the British after the American Revolution.

Honour

Colour

Pronunciation

Fast – father and man

Secretary

Dialects in the US

Settlers arrived to different parts of the US from different

parts of England.

Their exposure to other cultures also leads to dialects.

Isogloss – a word that is only used regionally

Dialects in the

Eastern U.S.

Fig. 5-4: Hans Kurath divided the eastern U.S.

into three dialect regions, whose

distribution is similar to that of

house types (Fig. 4-9).

Key Issue #2

Why is English related to other languages?

The Indo-European Language Family

Branches of Indo-European

Germanic branch

Indo-Iranian branch

Balto-Slavic branch

Romance branch

Origin and diffusion of Indo-European

Kurgan and Anatolian theories

Key terms

Language Family – largest collection of languages from a

common ancestor

Language Branch – a collection of languages related through

a common ancestor within a language family.

Language group – a collection of languages within a branch

Indo-European Branch It has eight branches:

Germanic branch

Indo-Iranian branch

Balto-Slavic branch

Romance branch

Albanian branch

Armenian branch

Greek branch

Celtic branch

Indo-European Language Family

Fig. 5-5: The main branches of the Indo-European language family include Germanic, Romance,

Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian.

Germanic Branch

North Germanic Group

Danish

Norwegian

Swedish

West Germanic

English

German

Dutch

Germanic Branch of

Indo-European

Fig. 5-6: The Germanic branch today is divided

into North and West Germanic

groups. English is in the West

Germanic group.

Indo Iranian Branch

Indic Group

Hindi (India)

Urdu (Pakistan)

Iranian group

Persian (Farsi)

Pathan

Kurdish

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.

Balto-Slavic Branch

East and Balto Slavic Groups

Russian

Ukrainian

Belorussian

West and South Slavic

Polish

Czech

Slovak

Russian Sign

Russian is an Indo-European language written in the Cyrillic alphabet, originally brought to

Russia by Greek missionaries

Romance Branch

Spanish

French

Portuguese

Italian

Vulgar Latin

Romance Branch of Indo-European

Fig. 5-8: The Romance branch includes three of the world’s 12 most widely spoken languages

(Spanish, French, and Portuguese), as well as a number of smaller languages and

dialects.

Signs in Barcelona, Spain

Signs in Barcelona are written both in Catalán (top) and Spanish (bottom).

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Haitian Creole and French are both official languages in Haiti, although English is also used.

Origin and Diffusion of Indo European

Original Ancestor cannot proved with certainty, would be

called Proto Indo European.

Two theories on origination and diffusion.

Kurgan Theory

Anatolian Hearth Theory

Kurgan Theory

Kurgans were herders near modern day Russia and

Kazakhstan. Very Nice.

Moved west and south looking for grasslands for their

animals.

Kurgan Theory of Indo-European Origin

Fig. 5-9: In the Kurgan theory, Proto-Indo-European diffused from the Kurgan hearth

north of the Caspian Sea, beginning about 7000 years ago.

Anatolian Hearth Theory

Colin Renfrew argues that the original people lived 2,000

years before the Kurgans in eastern Anatolia.

Renfrew believes they diffused from Anatolia westward to

Greece.

From Greece westward to Italy.

From Greece north towards the Danube and into central

Europe.

Renfrew argues that diffusion was for agricultural purposes

and not military conquest.

Anatolian Hearth Theory of Indo-European

Origin

Fig. 5-10: In the Anatolian hearth theory, Indo-European originated in Turkey before

the Kurgans and diffused through agricultural expansion.

Key Issue #3

Where are other Languages distributed?

Distribution of Other Language

Families

Classification of languages

Distribution of language families

Sino-Tibetan language family

Other East and Southeast Asian language families

Afro-Asiatic language family

Altaic and Uralic language families

African language families

Classification of Languages

Indo-European family – about 50% of the world speaks a

language from here (English, Spanish, French)

Sino-Tibetan family – about 20% of the world speaks, mostly

Chinese

Afro-Asiatic (5%) – mostly in the Middle East

Austronesian (5%) – southeast Asia

Niger-Congo (5%) – in Africa

Dravidian (5%) – In India

All other Language Families make up 10%.

Language Families of the World

Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more

than 50 million speakers are named.

Major Language Families

Percentage of World Population

Fig. 5-11a: The percentage of world population speaking each of the main language families.

Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan together represent almost 75% of the world’s

people.

Language Family Trees

Fig. 5-12: Family trees and estimated numbers of speakers for the main world language

families.

Sino-Tibetan Family

Mostly the languages of China

Smaller branches include Austro-Thai and Tibeto-Burman

There is no single Chinese language, largest one is Mandarin.

The government emphasizes Mandarin. Also all languages

are written the same way, but pronounced differently.

The Chinese language uses symbols instead of characters.

This creates thousands of characters that represent ideas.

Symbols instead of characters are called ideograms.

Chinese

Ideograms

Fig. 5-13: Chinese language ideograms mostly represent concepts rather than sounds.

The two basic characters at the top can be built into more complex

words.

Other East and Southeast Asian

Languages

Japanese and Korean are different language families. Isolation

makes them unique to the other languages.

Japanese and Korean languages are written in symbols that

represent sounds, like Western languages.

Afro-Asiatic Language Family

Arabic and Hebrew are the main languages.

Many people learn these languages because of the religious

backgrounds of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Arabic was added to the UN list of official languages.

Altaic and Uralic Languages

Once thought to be related, but recent studies shows that

they are not.

Altaic languages are spoken from Turkey to China. Turkish

largest of these languages.

Uralic Languages are spoken in Finland, Hungary and

Estonia.

African Language Families

Niger-Congo Family – largest language is Swahili

Nilo-Saharan Family – decreasing numbers, six main groups

Khosian Family – the use of clicking languages

Austronesian Family – spoken in Indonesian

Nigeria has problems because it has 200 hundred languages.

Language

Families of

Africa

Fig. 5-14: The 1000 or more languages of Africa are divided among five main language families,

including Austronesian languages in Madagascar.

Languages of

Nigeria

Fig. 5-15: More than 200 languages are spoken in Nigeria, the largest country in Africa (by

population). English, considered neutral, is the official language.

Key Issue #4

Why do people preserve local languages?

Language Diversity & Uniformity

Preserving language diversity Hebrew: reviving extinct languages

Celtic: preserving endangered languages

Multilingual states

Isolated languages

Global dominance of English English as a lingua franca

Diffusion to other languages

Preserving Language Diversity

Thousands of languages become extinct.

Peru once had over 500 languages, now only 57 remain.

Gothic is now extinct.

Hebrew – a revival

Hebrew became extinct.

Bible passages are the reason that Hebrew has been revived.

Create new words for revived languages.

Celtic - preservation

Two major groups – Goidelic and Brythonic

Gaelic (Irish and Scotland are alive today)

Welsh is also trying to be revived.

Ireland Road Signs

Road signs in Ireland are written in both English and Gaelic (Goidelic).

Multilingual States

Belgium – French and Flemish

The two languages and people are at odds and do not like each

other.

Had to create two governmental regions for each language

group.

Switzerland – German, French, Italian and Romansh.

Local governments keep peace and most people speak at least

two of the languages, majority speak three.

Language Divisions in Belgium

Fig. 5-16: There has been much tension in Belgium between Flemings, who live in the north

and speak Flemish, a Dutch dialect, and Walloons, who live in the south and speak

French.

Bookstore in

Brussels,

Belgium

The name of the bookstore is printed in

both French (top) and Flemish

(bottom).

Jerusalem

Street sign

A street in Jerusalem was re-

named New York after Sept.

11, 2001. The street name is

shown in Hebrew, Arabic, and

English

Language Areas in Switzerland

Fig. 5-17: Switzerland remains peaceful with four official languages and a decentralized

government structure.

Isolated Languages

A language nit related to any other.

Basque is one of the best examples. It is spoken in northern

Spain near the Pyrenees mountains.

Icelandic is related but it has not changed over the last 1,000

years. So it is really distant to the other members of its

family.

Global Dominance of English

English is the lingua franca, the language most of the world

does business in.

They may speak in pidgin language. It is often a mixture of

the native language and the lingua franca.

Ebonics – a dialect of English that derived from segregation.

Franglais – a mixture of English and French, in Canada and

France.

Spanglish – a mixture of English and Spanish, in US and other

Latin American countries.

French-English Boundary in Canada

Fig. 5-18: Although Canada is bilingual, French speakers are concentrated in the

province of Quebec, where 80% of the population speaks French.

Online Population, 1996 - 2005

Fig. 5-1.1: English is still the largest language on the internet, but there has been rapid

growth in many others, especially Chinese.

E-Commerce

Languages

2000 & 2004

Fig 5-1.2: English and English-speaking

countries still dominate e-

commerce, but other languages are

growing rapidly.

French Signs in Québec City

Spanish Signs in New York City