Friends, in our everyday life we rarely think about the fact that nothing in the world stands still. Unfortunately, most of the trends that take place on planet Earth are negative: be it the deterioration of the environmental situation, the global rapid extinction of flora and fauna, etc.
Along with these well-known problems, few people know that languages are rapidly disappearing in the world today, and this trend is at a much higher rate than even the disappearance of animal species.
Judging by the calculations of linguists, the register languages of the world About 6 thousand languages are included, but 90% of them are used by less than one hundred thousand people! 46 languages of the world have only one speaker! As UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura noted, almost half of the existing languages will die out in the next 100 years. Linguists have established that in order for a language to live and develop successfully, it is necessary that at least 1 million people speak it, and there are currently no more than 250 of them in the world.
In this regard, I found a very interesting interactive atlas on the Internet, which is called Map of the world's languages.
This map was created by the world-famous organization UNESCO in order to draw public attention to the rapidly threatening trend of extinction of the world's languages and the need to preserve the world's linguistic diversity.
For example, did you know that 131 languages are spoken in the Russian Federation? And what about the fact that there are 191 native speakers of languages in the United States? The UNESCO map of the world's languages will open up the world for you from unexpected sides that you never expected!
After selecting a country in the world from the “Country or area” list (don’t forget to click on the “Search Languages” button), you will be able to see multi-colored markers that indicate the degree of extinction that threatens a particular language. The languages themselves spoken in a particular region will be listed to the right of the map.
The color of the markers indicates the following:
- white – most children speak this language, but there may be some isolation
- yellow – children no longer learn this language as their first language
- orange – only the older generation speaks the language
- red – even grandparents speak the language partially and rarely
- black – there are no native speakers left
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the UNESCO map of the world's languages does not include languages that are currently not under threat.
By clicking on a specific marker on the map or on the name of the language to the right of it, you can find out details about the topic you are interested in language of the world.
The map can naturally be zoomed to reveal details about the languages of a particular region.
Friends, I hope the UNESCO map of the world's languages has made you take a slightly different look at the pace of globalization and the irreversible processes that are constantly taking place on our planet. I will be glad to see your opinions on this matter in the comments!
I created these amazing family tree illustrations using materials from Ethnologue to show the origins of the Indo-European and Uralic languages, as well as the linguistic connections between them.
This tree-like visualization was inspired by her own comic, Stand Still. Stay Silent, which takes place 90 years later in a post-apocalyptic Scandinavian world. Sandberg thus wanted to show why her characters understand each other, despite the fact that they speak different languages.
The size of a tree's leaves indicates how many people approximately speak a particular language. As you can see, English is one of the largest groups, along with Spanish and Hindi.
The stem of the Indo-European proto-language is divided into European and Indo-Iranian (this includes, for example, Hindi). A separate small tree is the Uralic languages, which includes the Finno-Ugric group (Finnish, Hungarian). These languages did not originate from a common proto-language, but independently.
With the help of a linguistic tree, it is clearly visible that the proximity of people in a territory does not at all mean that their languages originated from common roots. Conversely, languages can have the same origin even if their speakers live in different countries.
For example, let's take Finland and neighboring countries - Sweden, Denmark, Norway. The next part of the image shows that Finnish belongs to the Uralic language family, while Swedish, Danish and Norwegian belong to the Germanic language family.
The European part of the tree is divided into Slavic, Romanesque, Germanic, Celtic and other branches. Celtic languages, like Latin, are shown as thin branches.
On the left side of the diagram, the relationship between the Indo-Iranian languages is visible.
In the scheme, a special part is given to the Finnish language, since the author is from Finland. Even earlier, Sandberg used a cat's meow to illustrate the difference between her native Finnish and other Scandinavian languages.
Hello dear readers! Today it’s time to talk about what language families exist in the world. We will discuss everything in detail with their branches, groups, everything as it should be. Let's get started, let's not waste time 🙂
Language family - This is the largest unit of classification of peoples (ethnic groups) on the basis of linguistic kinship - the common origin of their languages from a specific base language. Language families are divided into several language groups.
The largest of which, in terms of number, is the Indo-European language family. It includes the following language groups:
1) Romanesque: French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Moldovans, Romanians and the like;
2) German: Germans, English, Scandinavians and others;
3) Slavic: Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Croats, Slovaks, Czechs, Bulgarians, Serbs and the like.
All languages are united by family ties into, each of which includes a group of closely related languages that were in ancient times dialects of the same language or belonged to the same linguistic union.
The largest of these families are: Indo-European (44.8% of the total world population), Seno-Tibetan (22.6%), Niger-Kordofanian(6.1%), Afroasiatic (5.6%), Austronesian(4.9%), Dravidian (3.9%). There are also so-called isolated languages that do not belong to any family or group (Japanese, Korean, Ainu).
Family of Indo-European languages.
Indo-European languages – These are some of the largest language families, which include:
Heto-Luwian,
Anatolian, group;
Indo-Aryan or Indian group;
Iranian group;
Armenian;
Phrygian language;
Greek group;
Thracian language;
Albanian;
Illyrian language;
Venetian language;
Italian group;
Romanesque group;
Celtic group;
German group;
Baltic group;
Slavic group;
Ohara group.
The belonging of some other languages (for example, Etruscan) to Indo-European languages remains controversial. The languages of the Indo-European family are spoken by more than 150 peoples, which is half of the world's population.
Turkic languages.
Turkic languages – it is a group of related languages. Probably belongs to the hypothetical Altaic macrofamily of languages. Divided into western ( Western Xiongnu) and eastern ( Eastern Xiongnu) branches.
Western branch includes: Bulgarian group - Bulgarian ( ancient Bulgarian), Khazar, Chuvash languages; Oguz group - Oguz (X - XI centuries), Turkmen, Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Turkish and other languages;
Kipchak group - Tatar, Karaite, Karachay-Balkar, Nogai, Bashkir, Karakalpak, Kazakh and other languages;
Karluk group - Uzbek, Uyghur (New Uyghur) and other languages.
The Eastern branch includes: Uyghur to the group - Old Uyghur, Yakut, Tuvan, and other languages;
Kyrgyz-Kypchak group - Altai, Kyrgyz languages.
There are other classifications of Turkic languages.
Finno-Hungarian languages.
Finno-Hungarian languages (Finnish-Ugric languages) – this is a family of related languages, which, together with the Somodyan languages, form a large genetic union - the Uralic languages. Divided into 5 branches:
1) Baltic Finnish - Karelian, Finnish, Vepsian, Izhorian, Estonian, Votic, Levian languages.
2) Sami language.
3) Volzko-Finnish (united by territorial characteristics) - Moksha-Mordovian, Mari, Erzya-Mordovian languages.
4) Perm - Komizirian, Udmurt, Komi-Permyak languages.
5) Hungarian - Hungarian and search-Hungarian, Mansi and Khanti languages.
Afroasiatic languages.
Afroasiatic languages ( Semitic-Hamitic, Afro-Asian) – is a macrofamily of languages that common in North Africa, Western Asia and the island of Malta.
Divided into 5 (or 6) main branches:
Semitic,
Egyptian,
Berber-Lithuanian,
Cushitic and Omotian (which is sometimes considered a branch of Cushitic).
Semitic languages.
Semitic languages – is this a branch of the Eurasian one, or Semitic-Hamitic, macrofamily of languages. Consists of the following groups:
1) north-peripheral, or eastern (Acadian with Babylonian and Assyrian dialects became extinct);
2) north-central, or northwestern [living - Hebrew and New Aramaic dialects, which are united under the name (New Syriac) Assyrian language; dead - Amorite, Eblaite, Phoenician-Punic, Canaanite, Aramaic and Old Hebrew dialects: Imperial Aramaic, Old Aramaic; Western Aramaic: Palmyrene, Palestinian, Nabatean; Eastern Aramaic: Syriac, Babylonian-Talmudic, Mandaean ];
3) south central[Arabic (with dialects) and Maltese];
4) southern peripheral(living - Mehri, Shauri, Soqotri and others; dead - Sabaean, Minaan, Kataban);
5) Ethiosemitic (living - Tigre, Tigrayan, or Tirganya, Argobba, Amharic and others; dead - Gafat, Geez or Ethiopian).
The last three groups are often combined into one. The most ancient monuments of the Semitic languages are Akkadian cuneiform inscriptions, their names and the names of places in Palestine in Egyptian inscriptions (3rd - 2nd millennium BC). There are written notes in languages such as Hebrew, Akatian, Ethiopian, Syriac, and Arabic. Inscriptions have been preserved in Ugaritic, Minean, Phoenician-Punic, Sabaean and other languages.
Seno-Tibetan languages.
Seno-Tibetan languages ( Sino-Tibetan) — a family of languages spoken in Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan, China and northeastern India.
There is no generally accepted genetic classification. There are two branches: Tibeto-Burmese and Chinese.
Main languages and language groups: Chinese, Tibetan (Tibetan and several related languages in the Himalayas), Lolo-Burmese (Burmese, Hani, Lisu, Asi, Lolo and the like), Newari, Kachin, Tangut, Kuki, Karen, Naga Manipuri and other languages. In languages Sino-Tibetan families speak to more than 1.2 billion people.
Indo-Iranian languages.
Indo-Iranian languages – it is a special branch of the Indo-European language family, which includes Indic (Indo-Aryan), Iranian and Dardic languages.
Mongolian languages.
Mongolian languages – These are the languages of the Mongolian peoples, which were formed in the XIV - XVI centuries. from dialects early Mongolian a language unique to all tribes. Includes Buryat, Mongolian, Kalmyk languages; unwritten Mongolian, Dongxiang, Baoan languages and others.
This is where we will probably end for today. I hope that this article helped you understand in more detail what language families are and their classification. There will be new articles soon. Subscribe to updates so you don't miss anything...
The genealogical (genetic) classification of languages is based on the relationships of kinship between languages - the commonality of some languages by origin.
Genealogical classification of languages is a classification based on the genetic principle, i.e., grouping languages related by origin into language families. G.K.I. became possible only after the emergence of the concept of linguistic kinship and the establishment of the principle of historicism in linguistic research (19th century). It develops as a result of studying languages using the comparative historical method.
A set of techniques and procedures for the historical and genetic study of language families and groups, as well as individual languages, used in comparative historical linguistics to establish historical patterns of language development. S.‑i. m. is the most important tool for understanding the history of languages. With the help of S.-i. The diachronic evolution of genetically close languages is traced based on evidence of their common origin.
The main goal of S.‑i. m. is the reconstruction of the model of proto-linguistic states (see Proto-language) of individual families and groups of related languages of the world, their subsequent development and division into independent languages, as well as the construction of comparative historical descriptions (grammars and dictionaries) of languages included in one or another genetic community .
Comparison as a universal method of linguistic research in S.-i. m. is dominant. The greatest effectiveness in establishing the patterns of historical development of related language systems of S.-i. m. detects at the phonetic-phonological and morphological levels. The direction of research in this case can be either retrospective, i.e., going from a historically documented state to the original one, or prospective - from the initial state to a later one.
The relatedness of languages is a consequence of the fact that such languages originate from one base language (proto-language) through its disintegration due to the fragmentation of the native community. Thus, a comparative historical study of a certain language is possible only against the background of studying the historical fate of the people who are native speakers of this language.
Typological classifications of languages (isolating, agglutinative, inflectional, incorporating languages; synthetic and analytical types of languages)
According to the morphological classification, all languages of the world are divided into four types. - - The first type consists of inflectional or fusional languages. These include Slavic, Baltic, Italic, some Indian and Iranian languages. Languages of this type are characterized by a developed system of inflection and the ability to convey the entire range of grammatical meanings with one indicator. So, for example, in the Russian word “doma” the ending of the word “-a” is simultaneously a sign of both the masculine gender and the plural and nominative case.
Languages of the second type are called agglutinative. These include Turkic, Tungus-Manchu, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian, Andamanese and some other languages. Languages of this type are characterized, like inflectional languages, by a developed system of inflection, but, unlike inflectional languages, in agglutinative languages each grammatical meaning has its own indicator. Agglutinative languages are characterized by the presence of a common type of declension for all nouns and a common type of conjugation for all verbs. In inflected languages, on the contrary, we are faced with a large variety of types of declension and conjugation.
The third type consists of incorporating or polysynthetic languages. These include the languages of the Chukotka-Kamchatka family and some languages of the Indians of North America. Languages of this type are characterized by combining a whole sentence into one large complex word. In this case, grammatical indicators formulate not individual words, but the entire word-sentence as a whole.
The fourth type isolating languages - languages with a low morpheme-to-word ratio. Words in a maximally isolating language will consist of only one morpheme - the root, without forming either compound words or combinations with suffixes, prefixes, etc. In this respect, isolating languages are the opposite of synthetic languages, in which words can consist of several morphemes.
Typology of languages as a special branch of linguistics. Comparative typology of foreign and native languages as one of the sections of the private typology of languages. Relationship between typology and other linguistic disciplines
LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY, a section of general linguistics, a direction of research aimed at establishing similarities and differences between languages that do not depend on genetic relatedness or the influence of some languages on others. Typology usually seeks to isolate and consider the most important linguistic characteristics that presumably determine other aspects of the structure of the language (such as, for example, the way of connecting meaningful parts of a word or the so-called structure of a sentence). Research in the field of linguistic typology is based on material from representative samples from many languages of the world; conclusions drawn from the study of the sample, with certain reservations, can be extended to all the many languages of the Earth. Typology has a special interest in “exotic” or little-studied languages, such as those common in Southeast Asia, Africa, Oceania or the American Indians, but the material of the most widespread, prestigious and well-studied languages can equally be the subject of typological study.
Languages evolve like living organisms, and languages that descend from a single ancestor (called a "protolanguage") are part of the same language family. A language family can be divided into subfamilies, groups and subgroups: for example, Polish and Slovak belong to the same subgroup of West Slavic languages, part of the Slavic languages group, which is a branch of the larger Indo-European family.
Comparative linguistics, as its name suggests, compares languages in order to discover their historical connections. This can be done by comparing the phonetics of languages, their grammar and vocabulary, even in cases where there are no written sources of their ancestors.
The more distant languages are from each other, the more difficult it is to detect genetic connections between them. For example, no linguist doubts that Spanish and Italian are related, however, the existence of the Altaic language family (including Turkish and Mongolian) is questioned and not accepted by all linguists. At present, it is simply impossible to know whether all languages originate from a single ancestor. If a single human language existed, then it must have been spoken ten thousand years ago (if not more). This makes comparison extremely difficult or even impossible.
List of language families
Linguists have identified more than one hundred major language families (language families that are not considered related to each other). Some of them consist of only a few languages, while others consist of more than a thousand. Here are the main language families of the world.
| Language family | range | Languages |
|---|---|---|
| Indo-European | From Europe to India, modern times, by continent | More than 400 languages spoken by almost 3 billion people. These include Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French...), Germanic (English, German, Swedish...), Baltic and Slavic languages (Russian, Polish...), Indo-Aryan languages (Persian, Hindi, Kurdish, Bengali and many other languages spoken from Turkey to northern India), as well as others such as Greek and Armenian. |
| Sino-Tibetan | Asia | Chinese languages, Tibetan and Burmese languages |
| Niger-Congo (Niger-Kordofanian, Congo-Kordofanian) | Sub-Saharan Africa | Swahili, Yoruba, Shona, Zulu (Zulu language) |
| Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic-Hamitic) | Middle East, North America | Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew...), Somali language (Somali) |
| Austronesian | Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Pacific, Madagascar | More than a thousand languages, including Filipino, Malagasy, Hawaiian, Fijian... |
| Ural | Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, Northern Asia | Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Sami languages, some Russian languages (Udmurt, Mari, Komi...) |
| Altai (disputed) | from Turkey to Siberia | Turkic languages (Turkish, Kazakh...), Mongolian languages (Mongolian...), Tungus-Manchu languages, some researchers include Japanese and Korean here |
| Dravidian | South India | Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu |
| Thai-Kadai | Southeast Asia | Thai, Laotian |
| Austroasiatic | Southeast Asia | Vietnamese, Khmer |
| Na-Dene (Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit) | North America | Tlingit, Navo |
| tupi (Tupian) | South America | Guarani languages (Guarani languages) |
| Caucasian (disputed) | Caucasus | Three language families. Among the Caucasian languages, the largest number of speakers is Georgian |
Special cases
Isolated languages (isolate languages)
An isolate language is an “orphan”: a language whose belonging to any known language family has not been proven. The best example is the Basque language, which is spoken in Spain and France. Even though it is surrounded by Indo-European languages, it is very different from them. Linguists have compared Basque to other languages spoken in Europe, to Caucasian languages, and even to American languages, but no connections have been found.
Korean is another well-known isolate, although some linguists suggest a connection to the Altaic languages or Japanese. Japanese itself is sometimes considered an isolate, but it is best described as belonging to the small Japanese family, which includes several related languages such as Okinawan.
Pidgin and Creole languages
A pidgin is a simplified communication system that developed between two or more groups that do not have a common language. It does not come directly from one language, it has absorbed the characteristics of several languages. When children begin to learn pidgin as a first language, it develops into a full-fledged, stable language called a creole.
Most pidgin or creole languages spoken today are the result of colonization. They are based on English, French or Portuguese. One of the most widely spoken creole languages is Tok Pisin, which is the official language of Papua New Guinea. It is based on English, but its grammar is different, its vocabulary including many loanwords from German, Malay, Portuguese and several local languages.
