The Eight
Major
Language
Families
Because
LOVE Isn’t
Really An
International
Langauge
FOR
STARTERS
It is important to know:
THE EIGHT MAJOR LANGUAGE FAMILIES AND THE GLOBAL PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WHO SPEAK THEM
THE GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE EIGHT MAJOR LANGUAGE FAMILIES
TWO OR THREE EXAMPLE LANGUAGES WITHIN EACH MAJOR FAMILY
TWO OR THREE COUNTRIES WHERE EACH EXAMPLE LANGUAGE IS SPOKEN
The Eight Major Language Families are:
GLOBAL
DISTRIBUTION
OF MAJOR FAMILIES
FAMILIES
LANUAGES AND
COUNTRIES
We’ve already spoken about Indo European Family languages, but for the sake of review:
Indo European has Eight branches…
Indo-Iranian
Romance
Germanic
Balto-Slavic
Celtic
Greek
Armenian
Albanian
French
Hindi in France
India
German in Germany
Bengali
Spanish
in Bangladesh
in Spain
English
all over
the place
Russian
in
Russia
Portuguese
Punjabi inin
Pakistan
Portugal
Swedish
inPoland
Sweden
Polish
in
Persian
Italian
ininin
Italy
Iran
Scottish
Gaelic
Scotland
Bosnian in Bosnia
Irish
Gaelic
in Ireland
Greek
in Greece
Armenian in Armenia
Albanian in Albania
SINO-TIBETAN
LANUAGES
There are a number of Chinese languages,
but ¾ of Chinese peoples speak Mandarin
Chinese, and the government is imposing
Mandarin country-wide.
All Chinese languages are written in the same
form using characters called ideograms.
The Sino-Tibetan family has three branches:
The Sinitic Branch: Chinese in China
The Austro-Thai Branch: Thai in Thailand
The Tibeto-Burman Branch: Burmese in Burma
JAPANESE
Japanese uses three separates sets of
alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
One of them was inherited from the
Chinese ideograms, but the other two are
purely phonetic.
Japanese partly developed from Chinese in
isolation. It is spoken on the Islands of
Japan.
AFRO-ASIATIC
LANGUAGES
Afro-Asiatic languages are
spoken in the North African
and Southwest Asian portions
of the world. They include:
Hebrew in Israel
Arabic in the Arabian Peninsula
and Northern Africa
Its languages were used to
write the Tanakh (The Hebrew
Bible), the Bible, and the
Qur’an (the Muslim Bible).
ALTAIC
LANGUAGES
Altaic languages are spoken in an 8,000 kilometer band from Turkey in the west to Mongolia and Northern China in the east.
The family includes:
Turkish in Turkey
Turkmen in Turkmenistan
Uzbek in Uzbekistan
Kazakh in Kazakhstan
Uyghur in the Xinjiang region
of Northern China
Mongolian in the South
Mongolian region of Northern
China
When the Soviets governed the Altaic region, they suppressed Altaic languages to create a centripetal, homogenous national culture.
They also forced Altaic speakers to write in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.
Most Altaic speakers are Muslims and many Altaic languages use the Arabic alphabet.
With the all of the Soviet Union, Altaic languages became the official languages in many former Soviet Republics.
Many of these regions are shatterbelts (areas prone to civil war due to internal clashes between irreconcilable ethnic groups) because:
--restoring the Altaic languages threatens the rights of minorities in these countries
--the borders of the states formed often do not coincide well with the regions in which the languages are spoken
In these cases, languages acts like a centrifugal force
NIGER-CONGO
LANGUAGES
There are at least 1000 distinct languages in Africa
Most of these languages lack a written tradition, and only eight
are spoken by more than 10 million people.
In Northern Africa, Arabic, an Afro-Asiatic Language dominates.
Niger-Congo languages dominate in the Sub Saharan Africa. (95%)
There are six branches of the Niger-Congo Family.
Yoruba and Igbo in Nigeria
Shona in Zimbabwe
Zulu in South Africa
Swahili in Tanzania
Swahili is the first language of only 800,000 people in Tanzania,
but it is used as a second language by almost 30 million
Africans.
Local languages are used to communicate with neighbors, but
Swahili is used as a way to communicate between outsiders
from other areas and tribes.
AUSTRONESIAN
LANGUAGES
Austronesian languages are primarily spoken in
Southeast Asia.
There are 739 Austronesian languages including:
Javanese on the island of Java in Indonesia
Indonesian (as a second, trade language) in Indonesia
Malay in Malaysia
Malagasy in Madagascar
DRAVIDIAN
LANGUAGES
We won’t say much
about them here,
but there are about
17 Dravidian
Languages.
4% of the world’s
population speaks
one of them.
They are clustered
mostly in southern
India and represent
the languages of
India’s original
inhabitants.
India has 18 official
languages, four of
which are Dravidian
(in red).
CASE STUDY:
NIGERIA
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and it will be a top 10 country by 2050.
It has 493 distinct languages, only three of which have widespread use.
Hausa: (Afro-Asiatic) 15% in the North
Yoruba: (Niger-Congo) 15% in the Southwest
Igbo: (Niger-Congo) 15% in the Southeast
The peoples of different language groups have often fought.
Southern Ibos tried to secede in the 1960s, northerners claim that Southern Yorubas discriminate against them.
In Nigeria language differences create a CENTRIFUGAL force and threaten to shatter the country.
To calm the country, the government moved its capital from Lagos in the Yoruban dominated southwest to the more centralized Abuja.
It is a former English colony and English is the official language.