There are many very legitimate and well-respected linguists who only really work in one language Noam Chomsky being one of them. So I would estimate very informally that maybe half of the linguists I know are bilingual or trilingual, about a quarter are monolingual, and about a quarter have four or more languages at a pretty decent level.
And maybe 5 or 10 percent are true hyperpolyglots. Which is almost definitely greater than the general population. Among the language families here are Chocoan, spoken in Columbia and Panama; Barbcacoan, spoken in Colombia and Ecuador; and Chibchan, spoken from Honduras to Venezuela. Chibchan may be related to Misumalpan, spoken in Honduras and Nicaragua.
The family with the greatest geographical reach, spreading from Honduras down to Bolivia and as far east as Suriname, is Arawakan, with 40 languages, not including about two dozen extinct ones.
Some reserve the name Arawakan for a slightly larger group with 11 additional languages, but their genetic connection to the core family is unproven Campbell, , p. For this reason, Campbell uses Arawakan which includes the language Arawak for the core group that also goes by the names Maipurean and Maipuran, as listed in Ethnologue.
The Arawan family of western Brazil, with six languages, and Guajiboan, with five languages in Eastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela, comprise the group of 11 sometimes classed with Arawakan. Cariban is a family of 31 languages as well as around two dozen extinct ones in Brazil and Venezuela as well as in Guyana, Suriname, and Colombia. Most have just a few hundred speakers; some have a few thousand.
The largest is Macushi, with 18, speakers in Brazil. Tucanoan includes 25 languages in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. A few are extinct or very severely endangered. The two largest, with just over 6, speakers each, are Cubeo Colombia and Tucano Brazil.
Aymaran has just two languages. One of them is Aymara, spoken by a million in Bolivia and several hundred thousand in Peru. Quechuan languages are spoken natively by a greater number than any other language family indigenous to the Americas, a result of the spread of the Inca Empire in pre-Columbian times. The total speaking population is 8. The designations of all but two of the 44 Quechuan languages include the name Quechua along with a geographical identifier, reflecting a close relationship, though in most cases not mutual intelligibility.
Most are small, with a few thousand speakers. About a dozen others range from the tens of thousands to around ,, and a few more are spoken by several hundred thousand. All three belong to what is known as Peripheral Quechua, a sister branch to Central Quechua.
These two branches constitute the major break in the Quechuan family. Quechua is, along with Spanish, the official language in Peru. Phonological, structural, and lexical similarities between Quechua and Aymara have raised the possibility that the two are related, as discussed by Orr and Longacre and Kaufman and Berlin, , but Adelaar , argues instead that the many similarities must have resulted from intense contact predating the protolanguages along with subsequent diffusion.
Part of the reasoning is that the lexical similarities are in fact too similar where they occur and extend to only about a quarter of the vocabulary, while the rest is highly different. Jensen and Grimes , Kaufman and Berlin , and Rodrigues and Cabral regard the Tupian languages of Central Amazonia as a language stock—a grouping of languages families not fully established but thought to be distantly related.
Here it is listed as an established family, following Kaufman , Campbell , and Ethnologue. This set of 76 languages is grouped into 11 small branches and isolates and one major branch, Tupi-Guarani, which some recognize as a family in and of itself Michael et al. Its 51 languages are found in parts of Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia but once covered a much larger expanse of South America, from the eastern coast to the west and from northern Argentina up to French Guiana.
Yagua is known to have belonged to the Peba-Yaguan family, whose other two members are extinct. Beyond what is presented here, Campbell discusses many plausible and possible genetic relationships within South America. Campbell and Grondona , p. As with spoken languages, it is impossible to trace back to the time when the first sign languages were used. Signing systems developed into languages as communities of users grew and the communicative needs of the deaf were recognized by governments, educators, and the general public.
In parts of Europe, emerging deaf communities were developing sign languages well before the 18th century , and in Thomas Gallaudet established the first permanent deaf school in the United States, basing his methods on practices already in place in France and Britain. Ethnologue lists sign languages for the deaf, each one named for the location where it is used. ASL has become the most widely used sign language of the deaf, with , users in North American, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Africa.
ASL and other sign languages are not closely connected to the spoken languages of the regions where they are used. Sign languages also develop in response to other needs. A famous case is Plains Indian Sign Language, once used as a lingua franca by Native Americans over a vast expanse of North America and still in use in some regions Davis, Sign languages that have arisen in Aboriginal Australia in response to speech taboos and ritual observance have been described by Kendon Pidgins are simplified languages that arise out of a need to communicate among speakers lacking a common language, typically in colonial situations where one group is dominant.
Members of the dominated group fuse grammatical features, often simplified, of their native language called the substrate with vocabulary from the dominant, or superstrate, language. The resulting language serves restricted purposes, such as trade. There are not many pidgins. Ethnologue lists only 16, six of them in Africa and five in Oceania, if Indonesia is included.
Hiri Motu, an official language of Papua New Guinea, is noteworthy because it goes against some typical views of pidgins. This language developed between the Motu and their trading partners nearby before any European contact. After colonization, its use spread, though the colonizers themselves had little if any knowledge of it. More usual are the cases of the original Chinese Pidgin English, once known as Pigeon English, which arose in 17th-century China for trade with the British, and Nigerian Pidgin, which developed in the same era, again due to trade contact with the British, notably the slave trade.
The two had similar outcomes, eventually fading away—Hiri Motu in favor of Tok Pisin, a widely spoken creole of New Guinea, and Chinese Pidgin English in favor of Standard English, which came to be commonly taught in schools. Since then, a different language called Chinese Pidgin English has arisen on the Pacific island of Nauru, for communicating with Chinese-speaking merchants and traders.
By contrast, Chinese Pidgin English and Nigerian Pidgin had analogous origins for communicating with traders in a dominant position , yet different outcomes, since the first has died out, while the second has vastly expanded its uses and its speaking population. Currently Nigerian Pidgin is learned by many children at an early age for communication with peers in virtually any informal situation. Creoles are first languages of members of speech communities but originate from types of language contact resembling, if not always identical to, situations that give rise to pidgins.
Being acquired as a first language gives creoles a stability that pidgins lack, and so it is not surprising that many more creoles are in current use—93 listed in Ethnologue—than pidgins.
Thirty-two creoles are spoken around Latin America and the Caribbean, 26 in Oceania, and 22 in Africa. Like pidgins, creoles have a substrate and a superstrate. English is the superstrate for 33 creoles, Malay for 14, Portuguese for 13, and French for Probably the most vigorously debated topic in current pidgin and creole studies is how creoles form and evolve.
Bickerton , interpreted creolization in terms of what is known as the bioprogram hypothesis. This would see creoles as developing from a pidgin that learners were exposed to at an early age. This idea excited those who saw its potential to shed light on the human language faculty in general.
At the same time, among creolists, the bioprogram hypothesis gave rise to a literature that almost universally sought to disprove it. Viewed more positively, it engendered lots of new thinking on how creoles come about. Veenstra surveys some of the progress made during this period. Another criticism cited the fact that some creoles develop without having a pidgin as a source. One area of agreement is that neither pidgins nor creoles are homogeneous types, as earlier work seemed to assume.
There are many varieties, as is found with the rest of the languages covered in this essay. Ethnologue and Glottolog are comprehensive, frequently updated databases on languages and language families. Both sites list all known languages and language families, with extensive bibliographies. Included on the Ethnologue website are nearly language maps and several tables of statistics on the largest languages.
Ethnologue also exists in print form, as three volumes listed under Simons and Fennig in section 8. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online is a database of typological information on languages of the world. The data are collected by a team of 55 from grammars and other descriptive materials and organized into 99 chapters on areas of phonology, morphology, and syntax. The site is frequently updated with comments and corrections.
An online database of scholarly hypotheses about possible language families and their membership is Multitree. A pronouncing dictionary of selected words from nearly world languages is at Forvo. Audio pronunciations for over , words are available for some languages, down to a few hundred for others.
Its search functions permit one to identify languages by country and by levels of endangerment. The entry for each language includes its number of speakers, alternate names, and geographical coordinates.
A complementary print atlas with 13 chapters by experts on the languages of different world is published by UNESCO in five languages. The next section includes a reference to the English-language version. Asher, R. Atlas of the world's languages 2d ed. London: Routledge. Find it in your library Google Preview WorldCat. Austin, P. One thousand languages: Living, endangered, and lost. Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, G. New York: Routledge.
Comrie, B. Languages of the world. Rees-Miller Eds. Malden: Blackwell. Lyovin, A. Introduction to the languages of the world. New York: Oxford University Press. Moseley, C. Pereltsvaig, A. Languages of the world: An introduction. Simons, G. Ethnologue: Languages of Asia 20th ed. Dallas: SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of Africa and Europe 20th ed. Ethnologue: Languages of the Americas and the Pacific 20th ed.
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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Search within Article contents 1. Europe 1. Africa 2. Asia 3. Oceania 4. The Americas 5. Sign Languages 7. Pidgins and Creoles 7. Show Summary Details Languages of the World.
Languages of the World. William R. Leben William R. Leben Department of Linguistics, Stanford University. Keywords languages language family language history language classification sign language pidgin creole. Oceania Oceania, which includes Australia and most of the island territories of the central and southern Pacific and Indian oceans, is home to the Austronesian family and to two very large language groups, the Australian and the Papuan groups.
Among these are: -. Javanese, the language of nearly 90 million, centered in Java, Indonesia. The Americas The past and present states of indigenous languages in the Americas are entirely different as a result of colonization by Europeans.
Sign Languages As with spoken languages, it is impossible to trace back to the time when the first sign languages were used. Further Reading Online Resources Ethnologue and Glottolog are comprehensive, frequently updated databases on languages and language families. The pronunciations are collected from users of the site. Books and Articles Asher, R. References Europe Adkins, M. Will the real Breton please stand up?
Language revitalization and the problem of authentic language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language , , 55— Gamkrelidze, T. The early history of Indo-European languages. Scientific American , 3 , — Indo-European and Indo-Europeans: A reconstruction and historical analysis of a proto-language and proto-culture. Part 1: Text. Nichols , Trans. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ancient genomes link early farmers from Atapuerca in Spain to modern-day Basques. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 38 , — Salminen, T. That is not due to any increase in the number of languages, but rather to our increased understanding of how many languages are actually spoken in areas that had previously been underdescribed.
Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics , now known as SIL International with an interest in translating the Christian Bible. As of , at least a portion of the bible had been translated into 2, different languages, still a long way short of full coverage.
Did you know that most languages belong to a family? A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another. The best known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs. Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages.
One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated languages spoken by a population of around 3. That makes the average number of. Photo credit: Minna Sundberg. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.
We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the way places. Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed apart from the status of French in Canada in terms of English vs. Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived.
In pre-contact times, over languages were spoken in North America. Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English , Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families.
When a language ceases to be learned by young children, its days are clearly numbered , and we can predict with near certainty that it will not survive the death of the current native speakers. The situation in North America is typical. Of about indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by as many as 10, people. About 75 are spoken only by a handful of older people, and can be assumed to be on their way to extinction.
While we might think this is an unusual fact about North America, due to the overwhelming pressure of European settlement over the past years, it is actually close to the norm. Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died and were reborn, like Hebrew?
And in any case, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should we question the wisdom of that choice? But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the language was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no longer the principal language of the Jewish people.
During this time, it remained an object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And there are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that language death is reversible. I freely admit that I take a restrictive view on what makes a linguist. I do not accept translators, polyglots, engineers, teachers, or a whole host of professionals whose jobs happen to involve language in some way as linguists.
I base my definition on the skill set. And the skill set of an academic linguist is very different than that of the list I just mentioned and the one you suggested. So, for example, a native speaker of Czech who is hired by a speech recognition company to provide various services does not count as a linguist to me. That distinction does not trivialize their skills; it simply recognizes that their skills are categorically different than an academic linguist i. And that categorical distinction is critical to my original rant, which this post grew out of.
So I remain comfortable with the estimation. I see an entirely different underestimation in your numbers. The original post concerned people with the skill set necessary to describe the languages of the world. While a native-speaker translator, a businesswoman who did a B.
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