Language

C

Pidgins and Creoles

A pidgin is an auxiliary language (a language used for communication by groups that have different native tongues) that develops when people speaking different languages are brought together and forced to develop a common means of communication without sufficient time to learn each other's native languages properly. Typically, a pidgin language derives most of its vocabulary from one of the languages. Its grammatical structure, however, will either be highly variable, reflecting the grammatical structures of each speaker's native language, or it may in time become stabilized in a manner very different from the grammar of the language that contributed most of its vocabulary. Historically, plantation societies in the Caribbean and the South Pacific have originated many pidgin languages. Tok Pisin is the major pidgin language of Papua New Guinea. Both its similarities to and its differences from English can be seen in the sentence “Pik bilong dispela man i kam pinis,” meaning “This man's pig has come,” or, more literally, “Pig belong this-fellow man he come finish.”

Since a pidgin is an auxiliary language, it has no native speakers. A creole language, on the other hand, arises in a contact situation similar to that which produces pidgin languages and perhaps goes through a stage in which it is a pidgin, but a creole becomes the native language of its community. As with pidgin languages, creoles usually take most of their vocabulary from a single language. Also as with pidgins, the grammatical structure of a creole language reflects the structures of the languages that were originally spoken in the community. A characteristic of creole languages is their simple morphology. In the Jamaican Creole sentence “A fain Jan fain di kluoz,” meaning “John found the clothes,” the vocabulary is of English origin, while the grammatical structure, which doubles the verb for emphasis, reflects West African language patterns. Because the vocabularies of Tok Pisin and Jamaican Creole are largely of English origin, they are called English-based.

VI

Languages of the World

Estimates of the number of languages spoken in the world today vary depending on where the dividing line between language and dialect is drawn. For instance, linguists disagree over whether Chinese should be considered a single language because of its speakers' shared cultural and literary tradition, or whether it should be considered several different languages because of the mutual unintelligibility of, for example, the Mandarin spoken in Beijing and the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong (see Chinese Language). If mutual intelligibility is the basic criterion, current estimates indicate that there are about 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. However, many languages with a smaller number of speakers are in danger of being replaced by languages with large numbers of speakers. In fact, some scholars believe that perhaps 90 percent of the languages spoken in the 1990s will be extinct or doomed to extinction by the end of the 21st century. The 10 most widely spoken languages, with approximate numbers of native speakers, are as follows: Chinese, 1.2 billion; Arabic, 422 million; Hindi, 366 million; English, 341 million; Spanish, 322 to 358 million; Bengali, 207 million; Portuguese, 176 million; Russian, 167 million; Japanese, 125 million; German, 100 million. If second-language speakers are included in these figures, English is the second most widely spoken language, with 508 million speakers. See also Indian Languages.

A

Language Classification

Linguists classify languages using two main classification systems: typological and genetic. A typological classification system organizes languages according to the similarities and differences in their structures. Languages that share the same structure belong to the same type, while languages with different structures belong to different types. For example, despite the great differences between the two languages in other respects, Mandarin Chinese and English belong to the same type, grouped by word-order typology. Both languages have a basic word order of subject-verb-object.

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A genetic classification of languages divides them into families on the basis of their historical development: A group of languages that descend historically from the same common ancestor form a language family. For example, the Romance languages form a language family because they all descended from the Latin language. Latin, in turn, belongs to a larger language family, Indo-European, the ancestor language of which is called Proto-Indo-European. Some genetic groupings are universally accepted. However, because documents attesting to the form of most ancestor languages, including Proto-Indo-European, have not survived, much controversy surrounds the more wide-ranging genetic groupings. A conservative survey of the world's language families follows.

B

Indo-European Language Family

The Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages in Europe, and they also extend into western and southern Asia. The family consists of a number of subfamilies or branches (groups of languages that descended from a common ancestor, which in turn is a member of a larger group of languages that descended from a common ancestor). Most of the people in northwestern Europe speak Germanic languages, which include English, German, and Dutch as well as the Scandinavian languages, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Celtic languages, such as Welsh and Gaelic, once covered a large part of Europe but are now restricted to its western fringes. The Romance languages, all descended from Latin, are the only survivors of a somewhat more extensive family, Italic, which includes, in addition to Latin, a number of now extinct languages of Italy (see Italic Languages). Languages of the Baltic and Slavic (Slavonic) branches are closely related. Only two of the Baltic languages survive: Lithuanian and Latvian. The Slavic languages, which cover much of eastern and central Europe, include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. In the Balkan Peninsula, two branches of Indo-European exist that each consist of a single language—namely the Greek language and the Albanian language. Farther east, in the Caucasus, the Armenian language constitutes another single-language branch of Indo-European.

The other main surviving branch of the Indo-European family is Indo-Iranian (see Indo-Iranian Languages). It has two subbranches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Iranian languages are spoken mainly in southwestern Asia and include Persian, Pashto (spoken in Afghanistan), and Kurdish. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in the northern part of South Asia (Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh) and also in most of Sri Lanka (see Indian Languages). This branch includes Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhalese (the language spoken by the majority of people in Sri Lanka). Historical documents attest to other, now extinct, branches of Indo-European, such as the Anatolian languages, which were once spoken in what is now Turkey and include the ancient Hittite language.

C

Other European Language Families

The Uralic languages constitute the other main language family of Europe. They are spoken mostly in the northeastern part of the continent, spilling over into northwestern Asia; one language, Hungarian, is spoken in central Europe. Most Uralic languages belong to the family's Finno-Ugric branch (see Finno-Ugric Languages). This branch includes (in addition to Hungarian) Finnish, Estonian, and Saami. Europe also has one language isolate (a language not known to be related to any other language): Basque, which is spoken in the Pyrenees. At the boundary between southeastern Europe and Asia lie the Caucasus Mountains. Since ancient times the region has contained a large number of languages, including two groups of languages that have not been definitively related to any other language families. The South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, languages are spoken in Georgia and include the Georgian language. The North Caucasian languages fall into North-West Caucasian, North-Central Caucasian, and North-East Caucasian subgroups. The genetic relation of North-West Caucasian to the other subgroups is not universally agreed upon. The North-West Caucasian languages include Abkhaz, the North-Central Caucasian languages include Chechen, and the North-East Caucasian languages include the Avar language (see Caucasian Languages).

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