Vocabulary Language Literary Tradition Official Language
Language Family Language Branch Language Group Logograms
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World Languages 6,909 languages total 11 spoken by at least 100
million people- any guesses? English German Portuguese Spanish
Russian Arabic Bengali Hindi Japanese Lahnda Mandarin
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Language Family Language Family- a collection of languages
related through a common ancestral language that existed long
before recorded history Examples: INDO-EUROPEAN, examples: English,
German, French, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Sanskrit
HAMITO-SEMITIC (Afro-Asiatic), examples: Arabic, Hebrew, Berber,
Tuareg, Somali, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian SINO-TIBETAN, examples:
Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese MALAYO-POLYNESIAN
(Austronesian): Malagasy, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog,
Maori, Samoan, Hawaiian
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Language Branch Language Branch- a collection of languages
within a family related through a common ancestral language that
existed several thousand years ago Differences are not as old or as
extensive between language families Archaeological evidence can
confirm that the branches derived from the same family Example:
Indo-European Family has lots of branches, including Germanic
branch- includes Dutch, German, English, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish
Slavic branch- includes Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Russian,
Bulgarian, Polish
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Language Group Language Group- a collection of languages within
a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past
and display many similarities in grammar and vocabulary Example:
the Semitic branch includes these groups Languages spoken in the
Middle East and North Africa (Aramaic, Arabic, Canaanite), as well
as Ethiopian languages (Geez, Gafat, Amharic, Tigre, Harari), and
South Arabian languages
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Percentage of People Who Speak a Language From Each Major
Family
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Widely Used Language Families Indo-European is the most widely
used and is predominant in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin
America Sino-Tibetan is the second most widely used and includes
languages spoken in China as well as some smaller countries in
Southeast Asia Most predominantly spoken is Mandarin Mandarin is
one of the six official languages of the UN (the others are
Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic, and English) These languages
include logograms, which are often compounds Several different
language families developed in Southern and Eastern Asia- why?
Islands and peninsulas- isolation
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Examples of Logograms
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How Do Languages Develop? Migration Isolation Dialects
Incomprehensibility
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What Language Distributions Can Tell Us History and conquest
Isolation or integration of cultures Migration of peoples Economic
domination of certain cultures Influence of wealth and technology
Political divisions Physical geography barriers
