©Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studieslanguage unlimited!

language unlimited!©Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

languageunlimited!


Have you ever wondered…how children learnto speak?


Have you ever asked…why there are so many different languages in the world?


Do you know…

where English came from?


Have you noticed…some languages have many more speakers than others?


Have you wondered…how many languages it is possible to learn?


Strange for you, normal for me!Do you know what language this is?Can you hear any sounds different from English?


Xhosa

The language you have heard is spoken in South Africa. Can you name a famous Xhosa speaker? Nelson Mandela


What do you think?“Languages belong to everyone; so most people feel they have a right to have an opinion about it”

What is your opinion?Maybe it will change as you find out more…


Do you agree with these opinions?

2.The bigger the language the better it is

1. Sign language is not a real language


Do you agree with these opinions?3. Some languages are more beautiful than others

4. Grammar tells us

how to write correctly


So many questions!There are many different questions about language.Here are some answers… can you match them up?


1. What is the most polite language?

A. KoreanB. TurkishC. Chinese

Answer:There are 7 levels of politeness which are used to show respect to the addressee.

A. Korean


2. What is the oldest writing system still in use?


This dates from around 1200 BC and although it has changed since then it is still used by millions of people.

Answer:C. Chinese


3. What seems to be the loudest language?


This was measured in a study in 1970 which set out to measure speakers over various distances.

Answer:B. Turkish


4. What is said to be the most frequently spoken word on the planet?A. TheB. OKC. ilunga

Answer:First coined as a joke in Boston newspapers and meaning oll korrekt (a conscious misspelling of "all correct") it is now commonly used and understood worldwide.

B. OK


5. What is said to be the most frequently word in English?

A. TheB. OKC. ilunga

This is number one in the top 10 most frequent words in British English -as measured in the British National Corpus.

Answer:A. The


6. What is considered to be the hardest word to translate? A. The?B. OK?C. ilunga?

A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third.

Answer:C. ilunga

*‘ilunga’ comes from the language Tshiluba spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo

*


What would have happened if you hadn’t learnt to speak as a child?Evidence from discoveries of ‘wild children’ suggest that if you hadn’t learnt your first language by the age of 13 you probably wouldn’t be able to learn after that.


How many languages is it possible for one person to learn?If you have the time any number!The most multilingual person still living is Ziad Fazah who speaks 58 languages.


Ziad Fazah speaks all these languages:Albanian German Amharic Arabic Armenian Azeri Bengali Burmese Bulgarian Cambodian Cantonese Mandarin Wu Sinhalese Singapore English Korean Danish Dzongkha Spanish Finnish French Fijian Greek Hebrew Hindi Dutch Hungarian Indonesian English Icelandic Italian Japanese Swahili Lao Malay Malagasy Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Papiamento Persian Polish Portuguese Pashto Kyrgyz Romanian Russian Serbo-Croatian Swedish Tajik Thai Czech Tibetan Turkish Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese


What makes a word beautiful?No word is inherently more beautiful than another. In polls it is often the sound, meaning or the connotation of a word that makes it beautiful.


What makes a word beautiful?For example:mother (English)Rhabarbermarmelade (rhubarb jam in German)sommarvind (summer breeze in Swedish)


Does size matter?

There are over 6,000 languages in the world, some with lots of speakers and some with very few speakers, some are in remote places and some stretch across the whole world.


1. What is the BIGGEST language in the world (most speakers)A. English?B. Burumakok?C. Mandarin Chinese?

Answer:This is generally agreed to top the list of most speakers with some 880 million first language speakers

C. Mandarin


2. What is one of the smallest language in the world (fewest speakers)A. English?B. Burumakok?C. Mandarin Chinese?

Answer:Burumakok, in West Papua New Guinea, is spoken by fewer than 300 people

B. Burumankok


3. Which is the richest language

A. English?B. Burumakok?C. Mandarin Chinese?

Answer:English is spoken as a first language by the wealthiest economies

A. English


4. Which language has the most sounds?

A. English?B. !Xũ?C. Kâte

Answer:!Xũ is an African language which has 141 phonemes (a unit of sound that distinguishes meanings of words) including a large number of clicks

B. !Xũ


5. Which language is the most widespread?

A. English?B. !Xũ?C. Kâte

Answer:28% of the world’s land area is occupied by countries having English as their official language

A. English


6. Which language has the highest percentage of second language speakersA. English?B. !Xũ?C. Kâte

Answer:93% of speakers of this language spoken in New Guinea are second language speakers

C. Kâte


Fact or fiction?Many popular ‘facts’ about language are not necessarily true and many are still in dispute.


Here are some ‘facts’ about language, can you spot which are true?Answer true or falseHint, some may be both!


Languages can be dangerous!

False

True: Esperanto is an invented language that was banned in several countries by authoritarian regimes e.g. Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, China.

TrueTrue


Languages can be bought and sold

False

True: in Vanuatu (South Pacific island) a community sold their language to their neighbours and couldn’t use it any more!

TrueTrue


Languages never change

False

False: languages change all the time borrowing from each other, making up new words (as new things are invented), losing others as they go out of fashion!

True False


Languages can die

False

True: about 417 languages are under threat of extinction which means that they don’t have children among their speakers.

TrueTrue


Languages can kill

False

True: big languages can kill smaller ones by being the language of education or by their speakers being more economically powerful.English, Spanish, Portuguese are the biggest killers!

TrueTrue


You can’t just make up a new language

False

False: new languages have been created, the most successful of these being Esperanto (an international language created in 1887).

Klingon was made up for a TV programme. Do you know which one?

True False


Languages have relatives

False

True and false: most languages are related to other languages. There are 30 different language families — English belongs to the Indo-European family.

Basque (spoken in Spain) can’t be traced to any family — it is known as an isolate.

True FalseTrue


Animals can’t learn to speak

False

True and false: chimps have been taught some language (especially sign language) but they don’t have the ability to pronounce human language.

Birds can mimic human sounds e.g. parrots and lyrebirds, but they don’t understand what they are saying.

TrueTrue False


Languages can solve crimes

False

True: criminals have been identified from their writing or speech. For example, the uncle of a murdered teenager was identified as her killer by text messages he sent from her phone (pretending to be her).

TrueTrue


English is the easiest language to learn False

True and false: it is a matter of opinion only. English has been variously voted both easiest and hardest to learn.

True FalseTrue


Eskimos have up to 400 words for snow False

False: this is known as the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax which grew from a suggestion that there were four or more words for snow and the number kept getting bigger!

There are probably no more than 15 words in fact and English has nearly that many!

True False


Not all languages have separate words for ‘he’ and ‘she’

False

True: Finnish ‘hän’ covers he and she and most African languages don’t make the distinction.

TrueTrue


And there is much, much moreAs you can see languages are a big and interesting subject to study.And it is not just about learning new languages. It’s about finding the answers to many more questions about language.


Who has the answers?People who are interested in the big questions about language have often studied a subject calledlinguistic

s.


What is linguistics?

“Linguistics is about the history of language and how language works.”


What is linguistics?

“Linguistics helps us understand why human language is the way it

is.”


Descriptive not prescriptiveLinguistics is not about how we should speak or write.Instead, it’s about how we speak and write in reality.


Here are a few questions that students of linguistics may investigate:


How do we make speech sounds and

how do we understand them?


Why do some languages seem to be considered more important than others?


Why do language neighbours such as English and French appear to be so different from each other?


Why do speakers from different parts of the same country often use different accents and dialects?

Image © www.themindrobber.co.uk


Why can you say “John sent a text to me” but not “sent me text a John to”?


Stop press!

Look at these recent news headlines. What do you think the stories have in common?


It’s Hinglish, innit?Hinglish — a hybrid of English and southAsian languages, used both in Asia and the UK — now has its own dictionary.


‘Chatty George’ talks himself upGeorge is a chat robot who speaks 40 languages.


Cows also have regional accentsDairy farmers have noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from.


They wouldn’t be news without linguistics!All these stories are about language, and they wouldn’t have hit the headlines without someone, somewhere, showing an interest in them.


A few more things to considerLinguistics can be useful in society:It has helped to solve crimes (forensic linguistics). It can help to understand illnesses such as strokes (which can damage the speech area of the brain).


A few more things to considerIt can develop new technologies (voice recognition software). Did you know that spellcheckers were built by linguists?


So, why study linguistics?To find the answers to these unlimited questions about language… and much more!


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