1. Distribution of Language Families: Asia & Africa
AP Human Geography

2. Sino-Tibetan languages
form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia.
second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers

3. Sino-Tibetan Language Family Distribution

4. Sino-Tibetan Language Family Tree

5. Sino-Tibetan Language Hearth
the Himalayan plateau, where the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia (including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Irrawaddy) have their source
Language split into two main groups, Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, around 4000 B.C.
In the first century AD, TB peoples started moving south along the Malay peninsula blending with the Austronesian speakers

6. Chinese (ST - Sinitic Branch)
Mandarin
Spoken by 75% of Chinese people
Most spoken language in world
Official language of People’s Republic of China and Taiwan
One of the six official languages of the UN

8. Chinese (ST - Sinitic Branch)
Nine other branches of Chinese, including Cantonese
Cantonese
simplified or traditional Chinese
More common in Southeast Asia, Pacific Islands, and US

9. Structure of Chinese Language
Very different structure than Indo-European languages
Based on 420 one-syllable words
Far exceeds one-syllable sounds than humans can make
Use each sound to denote more than one thing (ex. Shi may mean lion, corpse, house, poetry, ten, swear, or die depending on what other syllable it’s coupled with)
Written language – thousands of characters
Most characters are ideograms, represent ideas or concepts
Difficult to learn to write
Educated Chinese know around 4,000 characters

10. Chinese Lesson - Julie

11. Other Sino-Tibetan Branches
Tibeto-Burman
Burmese – principle language
Spoken in Myanmar (previously called Burma)
32 million speakers
The oldest attested Tibeto-Burman language is Pai-lang, of the 3rd century, followed by Tibetan and Burmese
Austro-Thai
Thai – principle language
Spoken in Laos, Thailand, parts of Vietnam

13. Tibetan Alphabet

14. Afro-Asiatic family 4th largest language family
Has two major divisions—Semitic and Hamitic
Semitic covers the area from Tigris-Euphrates valley westward through most of the north half of Africa to the Atlantic coast
Domain is large but consists of mostly sparsely populated deserts
Arabic is the most widespread Semitic language and has the highest number of native speakers—about 186 million
Hebrew was a “dead” language used only in religious ceremonies
Today Hebrew is the official language of Israel
Amharic a third major Semitic tongues has 20 million speakers in the mountains of East Africa

15. Arabic The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters.
Arabic is written from right to left.
In Arabic short vowels are generally not written.
Arabic letters change their shape according to their position in a word.
Many dialects, mainstreamed by modern media
Added as the sixth official language of the UN in 1973, Security Council in 1982

16. Afro-Asiatic family Smaller number of people speak Hamitic languages
Share North and East Africa with Semitic speakers
Spoken by the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria
Spoken by the Tuaregs of the Sahara and Cushites of East Africa
Originated in Asia but today only spoken in Africa
Expansion of Arabic decreased the area and number of speakers

18. Altaic and Uralic Language Families
Turkish – most widely spoken by far
Others – languages of Central Asia (Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, etc.)
Uralic
All traceable to a common language, Proto-Uralic, used 7,000 yrs ago in Ural Mountains
Used today in Estonia, Finland, and Hungary (only European nations not speaking Indo-European languages)

20. Sub-Saharan African Language Families
Niger-Congo
Nilo-Saharan
Khoisan
Austronesian

21. Niger-Congo Family
Africa south of the Sahara Desert is dominated by the Niger-Congo family
Spoken by about 200 million people (95%)
Greater part of the Niger-Congo culture region belongs to the Bantu subgroup
Includes Swahili
The first language of only 800,000 people
Official language of Tanzania
the lingua franca of East Africa
One of few African languages with extensive literature

22. Nilo-Saharan 50 million speakers 10 branches
Over 15 languages with at least one million speakers each (ex. Dinka (South Sudan), Nubian (southern Egypt), Maasai (Kenya)
17 nations
Dates back to the paleolithic period

23. Khoisan
two ethnic groups of Southern Africa, who share physical and putative linguistic characteristics distinct from the Bantu majority of the region.
Culturally, the Khoisan are divided into the foraging San and the pastoral Khoi.
Most live isolated in the Kalahari Desert, allowing them to preserve their culture

24. Clicking
Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants
These are typically written with letters such as ǃ and ǂ.
Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently.
the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan.
The Juǀʼhoan language has 48 click consonants, among nearly as many non-click consonants, vowels, and four tones.
The ǃXóõ and ǂHõã languages are even more complex.

25. San Bushmen
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26. Austronesian language family
Most remarkable language family in terms of distribution
386 million speakers
Speakers live mainly on tropical islands
Ranges from Madagascar, through Indonesia and the Pacific Islands, to Hawaii and Easter Island
Longitudinal span is more than half way around the world
Latitudinally, ranges from Hawaii and Taiwan in the north to New Zealand in the south
Largest single language in this family is Indonesian —5O million speakers
Most widespread language is Polynesian
Language of the Philippines - Tagalog