Chapter 5: Language
Key Issue 1
Vocabulary
 Language
 Literary Tradition
 Official Language
 Language Family
 Language Branch
 Language Group
 Logograms
World Languages
 6,909 languages total
 11 spoken by at least 100 million people- any guesses?
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English
German
Portuguese
Spanish
Russian
Arabic
Bengali
Hindi
Japanese
Lahnda
Mandarin
Language Family
 Language Family- a collection of languages related
through a common ancestral language that existed long
before recorded history
 Examples:
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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
Language Branch
 Language Branch- a collection of languages within a
family related through a common ancestral language
that existed several thousand years ago
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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…
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Germanic branch- includes Dutch, German, English, Icelandic,
Danish, Swedish
Slavic branch- includes Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak,
Russian, Bulgarian, Polish
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…
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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
Percentage of People Who Speak a Language
From Each Major Family
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
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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?
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Islands and peninsulas- isolation
Examples of Logograms
How Do Languages Develop?
 Migration
 Isolation
 Dialects  Incomprehensibility
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