1. Chapter 5: Language Key Issue 1

2. Vocabulary Language Literary Tradition Official Language
Language Family
Language Branch
Language Group
Logograms

3. World Languages 6,909 languages total
11 spoken by at least 100 million people- any guesses?
English
German
Portuguese
Spanish
Russian
Arabic
Bengali
Hindi
Japanese
Lahnda
Mandarin

4. Language Family
Language Family- a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history
Examples:
INDO-EUROPEAN, examples: English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Sanskrit
HAMITO-SEMITIC (Afro-Asiatic), examples: Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Tuareg, Somali, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian
SINO-TIBETAN, examples: Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese
MALAYO-POLYNESIAN (Austronesian): Malagasy, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Samoan, Hawaiian

5. Language Branch
Language Branch- a collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago
Differences are not as old or as extensive between language families
Archaeological evidence can confirm that the branches derived from the same family
Example: Indo-European Family has lots of branches, including…
Germanic branch- includes Dutch, German, English, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish
Slavic branch- includes Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Bulgarian, Polish

6. Language Group
Language Group- a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display many similarities in grammar and vocabulary
Example: the Semitic branch includes these groups…
Languages spoken in the Middle East and North Africa (Aramaic, Arabic, Canaanite), as well as…
Ethiopian languages (Geez, Gafat, Amharic, Tigre, Harari), and
South Arabian languages

9. Percentage of People Who Speak a Language From Each Major Family

10. Widely Used Language Families
Indo-European is the most widely used and is predominant in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin America
Sino-Tibetan is the second most widely used and includes languages spoken in China as well as some smaller countries in Southeast Asia
Most predominantly spoken is Mandarin
Mandarin is one of the six official languages of the UN (the others are Russian, French, Spanish, Arabic, and English)
These languages include logograms, which are often compounds
Several different language families developed in Southern and Eastern Asia- why?
Islands and peninsulas- isolation

11. Examples of Logograms

12. How Do Languages Develop?
Migration
Isolation
Dialects  Incomprehensibility

13. What Language Distributions Can Tell Us
History and conquest
Isolation or integration of cultures
Migration of peoples
Economic domination of certain cultures
Influence of wealth and technology
Political divisions
Physical geography barriers