Languages of the word

Languages of the WORLD

Irma Nydia Villanueva Rivera

Every language is the most important language of the world - to its speakers…

World POPULATION

• 7,000 millions

The numbers of languages in the world

There are about 6,000 to 7,000 languages on earth today. Maybe more, maybe fewer, it depends on the way we count, on what we consider as a language, as a dialect…

3,000 about to be extinct

Facts

• Language existed long before writing.

• With the exception of the Sign Languages used by the deaf, and written languages,

the languages with which most of us are familiar rely on the medium of sound.

• For instance, children are explicitly taught to read and write sometime after they acquire a spoken language, and many cultures have never employed writing systems.

• It is remarkable that children seem to be innately disposed to perceive the sounds of language.

• Children are also innately disposed towards producing speech sounds.

• For spoken varieties of language, this includes the problem of control of the muscles of the vocal tract (lungs, throat, tongue, lips) responsible for making the sounds.

Language HISTORY

• History of the English Language

• All languages change with time. A comparison of Chaucer's English, Shakespere's English and Modern English shows how a language can change over several hundred years. Modern English spoken in Britain, North America and Australia uses different words and grammar.

• English is a West Germanic language with heavy influence from Old Norse, Old French, and other Romance languages. English is widely spoken around the world due to previous British exploration and colonization and later American expansion and cultural influence, including the internet.

THE LANGUAGE FAMILIES OF THE WORLD

• A language family is a grouping of linguistically linked languages, stemming from a common ancestral mother-language called Protolanguage.

• Most languages in the world belong to a specific family. Languages that have no demonstrable relation with others, and cannot be classified within a specific family, are generally known as language isolates.

• Creole languages are the only ones to be neither isolates, nor members of a linguistic family. They form their own different type of languages.

Language Planisphere

The Amerind Family (South America)

• The language map of South America includes some of the North American sub-families, and adds a few more. Well known languages include Quechua (Inca), Guarani, and Carib. The Andean language sub-family (which includes Quechua) numbers nearly nine million speakers.

Amerind includes nearly 600 languages, with more than 20 million speakers (North and South American

Indian languages).

TOP LANGUAGES

Most Widely Spoken Languagesin the World

• Mandarin Chinese tops the list of most popular world languages, with over a billion speakers.

普通話

Language Number of speakers (Approx.) • 1. Chinese (Mandarin) 1,213,000,000 • 2. Spanish 329,000,000 • 3. English 328,000,000 • 4. Arabic 221,000,000• 5. Hindi1 182,000,000 • 6. Bengali 181,000,000 • 7. Portuguese 178,000,000 • 8. Russian 144,000,000

• 9. Japanese 122,000,000 • 10. German 90,000,000

Source: Ethnologue, 16th Edition. 1. Encompasses multiple dialects.

Distribution of languages by area of origin (Part of the Ethnologue, 16th Edition, M. Paul Lewis, Editor)

Area Living languages

Number of speakers

Count Percent Count Percent Mean Median

Africa 2,110 30.5 726,453,403 12.2 344,291 25,200

Americas 993 14.4 50,496,321 0.8 50,852 2,300

Asia 2,322 33.6 3,622,771,264 60.8 1,560,194 11,100

Europe 234 3.4 1,553,360,941 26.1 6,638,295 201,500

Pacific 1,250 18.1 6,429,788 0.1 5,144 980

Totals6,909 100.0 5,959,511,717 100.0 862,572 7,560

Endangered languages

• 473 of the languages listed in the Ethnologue are classified as nearly extinct. They are classified in this way when "only a few elderly speakers are still living.”

Endangered languages

• The entries below give just the known population information.

• Africa (46 total)

• The Americas (182 total)

• Asia (84 total)

• Europe (9 total)

• The Pacific (152 total)

Every other week, somewhere on Earth, a language dies. Why is it important that we safeguard linguistic diversity? What do we lose when a language disappears?

A language is much more than a means of communication; it is the vector of a way of thinking, a culture, the depository of a people’s history, its mythology, its cosmogony, its music…It is not only words are lost when a language disappears, but an entire perception of the world.

The World's 10 most influential Languages by George Weber • The formula used to calculate the

importance of each language

A hierarchy of lingua francas

Rise and fall of major languages: the historical dimension.

The HISTORY of WRITING

The HISTORY of writing• The transfer of more complex information,

ideas and concepts from one individual to another, or to a group, was the single most advantageous evolutionary adaptation for species preservation. As long ago as 25,000-30,000 years BP, humans were painting pictures on cave walls. Whether these pictures were telling a "story" or represented some type of "spirit house" or ritual exercise is not known.

• The advent of a writing system, however, seems to coincide with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement. We see the first evidence for this with incised "counting tokens" about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic fertile crescent.

• Around 4100-3800 BCE, the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle and a written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture.

• Eventually, the pictographs were stylized, rotated and in impressed in clay with a wedge shaped stylus to become the script known as Cuneiform.

• For the next step toward the development of an alphabet, we must go to Egypt where picture writing had developed sometime near the end of the 4th millennium BC.

Writing systems

What is writing?

• Writing is a method of representing language in visual or tactile form.

• Writing systems use sets of symbols to represent the sounds of speech, and may also have symbols for such things as punctuation and numerals.

• First text in Castilian (X Century).

• Emilianenses Glosses are small hand-written annotations, realized in several languages ( Latin, Romance and euskera medieval ), between lines or in the margins of some passages of the Latin codex .

Example: SPANISH

Types of writing system

• Writing systems can be divided into two main types: those that represent consonants and vowels (alphabets), and those which represent syllables (syllabaries), though some do both. There are a number of subdivisions of each type, and there are different classifications of writing systems in different sources.

• Abjads / Consonant Alphabets

-Abjads, or consonant alphabets, have independent letters for consonants and may indicate vowels using some of the consonant letters and/or with diacritics.

-Semitic languages

• Syllabic Alphabets / Abugidas

• Syllabaries• Semanto-phonetic writing systems

• Undeciphered writing systems

• Alphabets-Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters that represent consonants and vowels.

• The ñ came originally from the letter n (nn became ñ ).

• The ñ does not exist in Latin and is the only Spanish letter of Spanish origins.

• English uses "gn," such as in "signal" and "campaign,“.

• Has been copied by two other languages: Basque and Galician (vascuense y gallego).

• Syllabic Alphabets / Abugidas-Syllabic alphabets, alphasyllabaries or

abugidas are writing systems in which the main element is the syllable.

-Syllables are built up of consonants, each of which has an inherent vowel, e.g. ka, kha, ga, gha.

• Syllabaries-A syllabary is a phonetic writing system

consisting of symbols representing syllables. -A syllable is often made up of a consonant plus a vowel or a single vowel.-Japanese

• Semanto-phonetic writing systems-The symbols used in semanto-phonetic writing systems often represent both sound

and meaning. As a result, such scripts generally include a large number of symbols: anything from several hundred to tens of thousands.

-Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Chinese

• Undeciphered writing systems-Writing systems that have yet to be

deciphered or have only been partially deciphered.

Resourse: Omniglot

There is no such thing as one language superior to another.

The importance of a language can not be measured. Cultures can not also be measured.

The Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico is not either better or worse than the Spanish spoken in Spain or Bolivia.

The English spoken in England is not superior than the English spoken in Belice.

Things to remember

Created by Irma Nydia Villanueva-RiveraSpanish Teacher, Puerto Rico Department of Education

[email protected]

http://irmavillanuevarivera.wordpress.com

http://lenguajelenguayhabla.blogspot.com