UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGES

What is a language? Language: the act of speaking, writing, or signing in a particular situation in order to communicate.

What is a language family? Language family: A group of languages deriving from a single ancestor or parent. English comes from the Germanic language family.

A 2:44

If languages have families, and thus descendants, how does that process occur? From Dialect to Language: Languages have dialects. When dialects become so different from one another that they cannot be mutually understood, they are generally considered to have formed a new “daughter” language.

What is a dialect? Dialect: A term that tends to refer to subvarieties of a single language. This is different from “accent,” because dialects can differ in terms of no only pronunciation, but also words, word and sentence structure, and meaning.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/

English Dialects http://aschmann.net/AmEng/#SmallMapCanada

How does knowing about languages and dialects help me learn Spanish? Predictably, Spanish also has a language family (Italic) and dialects all over the world. Knowing how languages, dialects and accents work help us better understand the complexities of the Spanish language, it’s dialects and accent varieties.

Discussion Questions How many Spanish-speaking countries do you think there are? Spanish is a national language in 20 sovereign states and one dependent entity, totaling around 442 million people. How many Spanish dialects do you think there are?

Discussion Questions There are hundreds of dialects of Spanish spoken around the world, and many more that have gone extinct. How can learning about the Spanish and English language families help English speakers learn Spanish faster?

WHILE WE LEARN SPANISH, OUR LANGUAGE-LEARNING HEROES WILL BE…

LATIN

FRENCH

OUR LANGUAGE-LEARNING HEROS Cognates: these words have the same linguistic derivation as another. They are from the same original word or root. English “animal” is also spelled “animal” in Spanish, though the pronunciation is a little different. These two words are cognates.

EXAMPLES OF OTHER COGNATES ENGLISH SPANISH actor balance capital criminal doctor flexible actor balance capital criminal doctor flexible

OUR LANGUAGE-LEARNING HEROS False Cognates: these are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but actually have different meanings.

EXAMPLES OF FALSE COGNATES ENGLISH SPANISH current, up-to-date actual knot nudo sand arena carpeta folder crime delito

EL FIN