Language

Language is broken into families, branches, and groups.

A language family is a collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed long before recorded history.

The two largest language families are Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan.

About 50 percent of all people speak a language in the Indo-European family.

About 20 percent speak a language in the Sino-Tibetan family.

Other major language families are:

Austronesian (in Southeast Asia) Afro-Asiatic (in the Middle East) Niger-Congo (in Africa) Dravidian (in India)

Within a language family, a language branch is a collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago.

A language group is a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary.

Germanic Language Branch

The Germanic language branch is probably the most familiar to us because English is closely related to German and is in the West Germanic Group.

German LanguageBranch in Europe

Orange = AnglicLight Green = DutchDark Green = High GermanBlues = Scandinavian

Romance Language Branch

The Romance language branch evolved from the Latin language spoken by the Romans 2,000 years ago, giving the branch its name. The four most widely used Romance languages are: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian.

These languages correspond to the European countries of Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. Mountains separate these four countries and are barriers to communication and trade.

Sinitic Language Branch

The Sinitic language branch is important because Chinese is in it. There is no single Chinese language, but Mandarin is the most important and is spoken by about three fourths of the Chinese people.

Cantonese, Wu, Min, and Hakka are also spoken in China, but the Chinese government is imposing Mandarin on the country. The small number of languages in China serve as a source of unity and is in stark contrast to India or Sub-Saharan Africa, where many languages are spoken.

Ideograms

The other distinctive feature of the Chinese language is the method of writing. Chinese is written from thousands of characters. Some of the characters represent sound by most are ideograms, which represent ideas and concepts.

Horse

Mountain

Rain

Japanese and Korean

To an untrained eye, Japanese and Korean are similar to Chinese. In fact, Japanese is written, in part, with Chinese ideograms, but it also uses two systems of phonetic symbols. Korean is a separate language family and does not use ideograms. Each letter represents a sound.

African Language Families

No one knows the precise number of languages spoken in Africa. Nearly 1,000 distinct languages and several thousand dialects have been documented. Only ten languages in Africa are spoken by more than 10 million people.

Arabic dominates northern Africa, but Sub-Saharan Africa is extremely complicated. A good example is Nigeria, which has over 200 languages. It is difficult to find a common language that enough people can understand. Having too many languages can weaken national unity.

Official Languages in Africa

Why Do People in Different Locations Speak Similar Languages?

Origin and diffusion of English

Origin and diffusion of Romance languages

English is spoken by more than any other people except Mandarin. Whereas Mandarin speakers are all clustered in one country, China, English speakers are distributed around the world.

English speakers exist around the world because people of England migrated with their language when they established colonies during the past four centuries. English is an official language in most of the former British colonies.

Ironically, English was not the original language of England. We know nothing about the original language of England, but 2,000 B.C. the Celts arrived in England from Europe. In turn, the Celts were invaded by Germanic tribes called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes around 450 A.D.

Some people still speak Celtic languages in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, but the dominate language became English. The name England itself is derived from Angle’s land.

Diffusion of Romance Languages

Romance languages are also spoken around the world because Europeans colonized other countries. For example, Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, and Spanish is spoken in most of Latin America. French is still spoken in parts of Africa and many islands in the Pacific.

Map of Francophone World or countries that share a French heritage and have many French speakers.

French sign in West Africa

This map shows how many people are fluent French speakersin Europe. Black means native speaker.

Number of FrenchSpeakers in the U.S.

Red = Over 18% of pop. speaks French.

Brown = 12 - 18% of pop.speaks French.

Yellow = 6 - 12%of pop. speaks French.

Areas with many Italian speakers

Areas with many German speakers

German signs in Namibia, Africa

Countries where Spanish is an official language orco-official language

Dialects

A dialect is a regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. British and American English are examples of dialects of English. Another example is French spoken in Quebec, Canada as opposed to French spoken in France.

Pidgin

A simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. See example of Hawaiian Pidgin below:You like try dat?I tryin foa tink.Eh, brah, you like beef? Kay den.

Creole

A creole or creolized language is defined as a language that results from the mixing of the colonizer’s language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated. Creole languages develop as stable nativized pidgin languages.

Lingua Franca

A language of international communication such as English is known as a lingua franca. During the 19th century, French, was a lingua franca. It was the preferred language of diplomats and politicians, and a strong literary tradition increased its use.

A group that learns a lingua franca may learn a simplified form, called a pidgin language. To groups construct a pidgin language by learning a few of the grammar rules and words of a lingua franca, while mixing in words of their own language.

Diffusion to Other Languages

Franglais

Spanglish