Language

I  INTRODUCTION 

Language, the principal means used by human beings to communicate with one another. Language is primarily spoken, although it can be transferred to other media, such as writing. If the spoken means of communication is unavailable, as may be the case among the deaf, visual means such as sign language can be used. A prominent characteristic of language is that the relation between a linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary: There is no reason other than convention among speakers of English that a dog should be called dog, and indeed other languages have different names (for example, Spanish perro, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu). Language can be used to discuss a wide range of topics, a characteristic that distinguishes it from animal communication. The dances of honey bees, for example, can be used only to communicate the location of food sources (see Honey Bee: Communication). While the language-learning abilities of apes have surprised many—and there continues to be controversy over the precise limits of these abilities—scientists and scholars generally agree that apes do not progress beyond the linguistic abilities of a two-year-old child (see Communication: Communication Among Animals).

II  LINGUISTICS 

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Several of the subfields of linguistics that will be discussed here are concerned with the major components of language: Phonetics is concerned with the sounds of languages, phonology with the way sounds are used in individual languages, morphology with the structure of words, syntax with the structure of phrases and sentences, and semantics with the study of meaning. Another major subfield of linguistics, pragmatics, studies the interaction between language and the contexts in which it is used. Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. A number of linguistic fields study the relations between language and the subject matter of related academic disciplines, such as sociolinguistics (sociology and language) and psycholinguistics (psychology and language). In principle, applied linguistics is any application of linguistic methods or results to solve problems related to language, but in practice it tends to be restricted to second-language instruction.

III  COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE 

Spoken human language is composed of sounds that do not in themselves have meaning, but that can be combined with other sounds to create entities that do have meaning. Thus p, e, and n do not in themselves have any meaning, but the combination pen does have a meaning. Language also is characterized by complex syntax whereby elements, usually words, are combined into more complex constructions, called phrases, and these constructions in turn play a major role in the structures of sentences.

A  The Sounds of Language 

Because most languages are primarily spoken, an important part of the overall understanding of language involves the study of the sounds of language.

Most sounds in the world's languages—and all sounds in some languages, such as English—are produced by expelling air from the lungs and modifying the vocal tract between the larynx and the lips. For instance, the sound p requires complete closure of the lips, so that air coming from the lungs builds up pressure in the mouth, giving rise to the characteristic popping sound when the lip closure is released. For the sound s, air from the lungs passes continuously through the mouth, but the tongue is raised sufficiently close to the alveolar ridge (the section of the upper jaw containing the tooth sockets) to cause friction as it partially blocks the air that passes. Sounds also can be produced by means other than expelling air from the lungs, and some languages use these sounds in regular speech. The sound used by English speakers to express annoyance, often spelled tsk or tut, uses air trapped in the space between the front of the tongue, the back of the tongue, and the palate. Such sounds, called clicks, function as regular speech sounds in the Khoisan languages of southwestern Africa and in the Bantu languages of neighboring African peoples (see African Languages).

Phonetics is the field of language study concerned with the physical properties of sounds, and it has three subfields. Articulatory phonetics explores how the human vocal apparatus produces sounds. Acoustic phonetics studies the sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus. Auditory phonetics examines how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear. Phonology, in contrast, is concerned not with the physical properties of sounds, but rather with how they function in a particular language. The following example illustrates the difference between phonetics and phonology. In the English language, when the sound k (usually spelled c) occurs at the beginning of a word, as in the word cut, it is pronounced with aspiration (a puff of breath). However, when this sound occurs at the end of a word, as in tuck, there is no aspiration. Phonetically, the aspirated k and unaspirated k are different sounds, but in English these different sounds never distinguish one word from another, and English speakers are usually unaware of the phonetic difference until it is pointed out to them. Thus English makes no phonological distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k. The Hindi language, on the other hand, uses this sound difference to distinguish words such as kal (time), which has an unaspirated k, and khal (skin), in which kh represents the aspirated k. Therefore, in Hindi the distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated k is both phonetic and phonological.

B  Units of Meaning 

While many people, influenced by writing, tend to think of words as the basic units of grammatical structure, linguists recognize a smaller unit, the morpheme. The word cats, for instance, consists of two elements, or morphemes: cat, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as “feline animal,” and -s, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as “more than one.” Antimicrobial, meaning “capable of destroying microorganisms,” can be divided into the morphemes anti- (against), microbe (microorganism), and -ial, a suffix that makes the word an adjective. The study of these smallest grammatical units, and the ways in which they combine into words, is called morphology.

C  Word Order and Sentence Structure 

Syntax is the study of how words combine to make sentences. The order of words in sentences varies from language to language. English-language syntax, for instance, generally follows a subject-verb-object order, as in the sentence “The dog (subject) bit (verb) the man (object).” The sentence “The dog the man bit” is not a correct construction in English, and the sentence “The man bit the dog” has a very different meaning. In contrast, Japanese has a basic word order of subject-object-verb, as in “watakushi-wa hon-o kau,” which literally translates to “I book buy.” Hixkaryana, spoken by about 400 people on a tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil, has a basic word order of object-verb-subject. The sentence “toto yahosïye kamara,” which literally translates to “Man grabbed jaguar,” actually means that the jaguar grabbed the man, not that the man grabbed the jaguar.

A general characteristic of language is that words are not directly combined into sentences, but rather into intermediate units, called phrases, which then are combined into sentences. The sentence “The shepherd found the lost sheep” contains at least three phrases: “the shepherd,” “found,” and “the lost sheep.” This hierarchical structure that groups words into phrases, and phrases into sentences, serves an important role in establishing relations within sentences. For instance, the phrases “the shepherd” and “the lost sheep” behave as units, so that when the sentence is rearranged to be in the passive voice, these units stay intact: “The lost sheep was found by the shepherd.”

D  Meaning in Language 

While the fields of language study mentioned above deal primarily with the form of linguistic elements, semantics is the field of study that deals with the meaning of these elements. A prominent part of semantics deals with the meaning of individual morphemes. Semantics also involves studying the meaning of the constructions that link morphemes to form phrases and sentences. For instance, the sentences “The dog bit the man” and “The man bit the dog” contain exactly the same morphemes, but they have different meanings. This is because the morphemes enter into different constructions in each sentence, reflected in the different word orders of the two sentences.

IV  LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 

Language acquisition, the process by which children and adults learn a language or languages, is a major field of linguistic study.

A  First-Language Acquisition 

First-language acquisition is a complex process that linguists only partially understand. Young children have certain innate characteristics that predispose them to learn language. These characteristics include the structure of the vocal tract, which enables children to make the sounds used in language, and the ability to understand a number of general grammatical principles, such as the hierarchical nature of syntax. These characteristics, however, do not predispose children to learn only one particular language. Children acquire whatever language is spoken around them, even if their parents speak a different language. An interesting feature of early language acquisition is that children seem to rely more on semantics than on syntax when speaking. The point at which they shift to using syntax seems to be a crucial point at which human children surpass apes in linguistic ability.

B  Second-Language Acquisition 

Although second-language acquisition literally refers to learning a language after having acquired a first language, the term is frequently used to refer to the acquisition of a second language after a person has reached puberty. Whereas children experience little difficulty in acquiring more than one language, after puberty people generally must expend greater effort to learn a second language and they often achieve lower levels of competence in that language. People learn second languages more successfully when they become immersed in the cultures of the communities that speak those languages. People also learn second languages more successfully in cultures in which acquiring a second language is expected, as in most African countries, than they do in cultures in which second-language proficiency is considered unusual, as in most English-speaking countries.

C  Bilingualism and Multilingualism 

Bilingualism is the ability to master the use of two languages, and multilingualism is the ability to master the use of more than two languages. Although bilingualism is relatively rare among native speakers of English, in many parts of the world it is the standard rather than the exception. For example, more than half the population of Papua New Guinea is functionally competent in both an indigenous language and Tok Pisin. People in many parts of the country have mastered two or more indigenous languages. Bilingualism and multilingualism often involve different degrees of competence in the languages involved. A person may control one language better than another, or a person might have mastered the different languages better for different purposes, using one language for speaking, for example, and another for writing.

V  LANGUAGE VARIETIES 

Languages constantly undergo changes, resulting in the development of different varieties of the languages.

A  Dialects 

A dialect is a variety of a language spoken by an identifiable subgroup of people. Traditionally, linguists have applied the term dialect to geographically distinct language varieties, but in current usage the term can include speech varieties characteristic of other socially definable groups. Determining whether two speech varieties are dialects of the same language, or whether they have changed enough to be considered distinct languages, has often proved a difficult and controversial decision. Linguists usually cite mutual intelligibility as the major criterion in making this decision. If two speech varieties are not mutually intelligible, then the speech varieties are different languages; if they are mutually intelligible but differ systematically from one another, then they are dialects of the same language. There are problems with this definition, however, because many levels of mutual intelligibility exist, and linguists must decide at what level speech varieties should no longer be considered mutually intelligible. This is difficult to establish in practice. Intelligibility has a large psychological component: If a speaker of one speech variety wants to understand a speaker of another speech variety, understanding is more likely than if this were not the case. In addition, chains of speech varieties exist in which adjacent speech varieties are mutually intelligible, but speech varieties farther apart in the chain are not. Furthermore, sociopolitical factors almost inevitably intervene in the process of distinguishing between dialects and languages. Such factors, for example, led to the traditional characterization of Chinese as a single language with a number of mutually unintelligible dialects.

Dialects develop primarily as a result of limited communication between different parts of a community that share one language. Under such circumstances, changes that take place in the language of one part of the community do not spread elsewhere. As a result, the speech varieties become more distinct from one another. If contact continues to be limited for a long enough period, sufficient changes will accumulate to make the speech varieties mutually unintelligible. When this occurs, and especially if it is accompanied by the sociopolitical separation of a group of speakers from the larger community, it usually leads to the recognition of separate languages. The different changes that took place in spoken Latin in different parts of the Roman Empire, for example, eventually gave rise to the distinct modern Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.

In ordinary usage, the term dialect can also signify a variety of a language that is distinct from what is considered the standard form of that language. Linguists, however, consider the standard language to be simply one dialect of a language. For example, the dialect of French spoken in Paris became the standard language of France not because of any linguistic features of this dialect but because Paris was the political and cultural center of the country.

B  Social Varieties of Language 

Sociolects are dialects determined by social factors rather than by geography. Sociolects often develop due to social divisions within a society, such as those of socioeconomic class and religion. In New York City, for example, the probability that someone will pronounce the letter r when it occurs at the end of a syllable, as in the word fourth, varies with socioeconomic class. The pronunciation of a final r in general is associated with members of higher socioeconomic classes. The same is true in England of the pronunciation of h, as in hat. Members of certain social groups often adopt a particular pronunciation as a way of distinguishing themselves from other social groups. The inhabitants of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, for example, have adopted particular vowel pronunciations to distinguish themselves from people vacationing on the island.

Slang, argot, and jargon are more specialized terms for certain social language varieties usually defined by their specialized vocabularies. Slang refers to informal vocabulary, especially short-lived coinages, that do not belong to a language's standard vocabulary. Argot refers to a nonstandard vocabulary used by secret groups, particularly criminal organizations, usually intended to render communications incomprehensible to outsiders. A jargon comprises the specialized vocabulary of a particular trade or profession, especially when it is incomprehensible to outsiders, as with legal jargon.

In addition to language varieties defined in terms of social groups, there are language varieties called registers that are defined by social situation. In a formal situation, for example, a person might say, “You are requested to leave,” whereas in an informal situation the same person might say, “Get out!” Register differences can affect pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

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.

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).

D  Asian and Pacific Language Families 

South Asia contains, in addition to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European, two other large language families. The Dravidian family is dominant in southern India and includes Tamil and Telugu. The Munda languages represent the Austro-Asiatic language family in India and contain many languages, each with relatively small numbers of speakers. The Austro-Asiatic family also spreads into Southeast Asia, where it includes the Khmer (Cambodian) and Vietnamese languages (see Austro-Asiatic Languages). South Asia contains at least one language isolate, Burushaski, spoken in a remote part of northern Pakistan. See also Indian Languages.

A number of linguists believe that many of the languages of central, northern, and eastern Asia form a single Altaic language family, although others consider Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic to be separate, unrelated language families (see Altaic Languages). The Turkic languages include Turkish and a number of languages of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), such as Uzbek and Tatar. The Tungusic languages are spoken mainly by small population groups in Siberia and Northeast China. This family includes the nearly extinct Manchu language. The main language of the Mongolic family is Mongolian. Some linguists also assign Korean and Japanese to the Altaic family, although others regard these languages as isolates. In northern Asia there are a number of languages that appear either to form small, independent families or to be language isolates, such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family of the Chukchi and Kamchatka peninsulas in the far east of Russia. These languages are often referred to collectively as Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic), but this is a geographic, not a genetic, grouping.

The Sino-Tibetan language family covers not only most of China, but also much of the Himalayas and parts of Southeast Asia (see Sino-Tibetan Languages). The family's major languages are Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. The Tai languages constitute another important language family of Southeast Asia. They are spoken in Thailand, Laos, and southern China and include the Thai language. The Miao-Yao, or Hmong-Mien, languages are spoken in isolated areas of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. The Austronesian languages, formerly called Malayo-Polynesian, cover the Malay Peninsula and most islands to the southeast of Asia and are spoken as far west as Madagascar and throughout the Pacific islands as far east as Easter Island. The Austronesian languages include Malay (called Bahasa Malaysia in Malaysia, and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia), Javanese, Hawaiian, and Maori (the language of the aboriginal people of New Zealand).

Although the inhabitants of some of the coastal areas and offshore islands of New Guinea speak Austronesian languages, most of the main island's inhabitants, as well as some inhabitants of nearby islands, speak languages unrelated to Austronesian. Linguists collectively refer to these languages as Papuan languages, although this is a geographical term covering about 60 different language families. The languages of Aboriginal Australians constitute another unrelated group, and it is debatable whether all Australian languages form a single family (see Australia).

E  African Language Families 

The languages of Africa may belong to as few as four families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan, although the genetic unity of Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan is still disputed (see African Languages). Afro-Asiatic languages occupy most of North Africa and also large parts of southwestern Asia. The family consists of several branches. The Semitic branch includes Arabic, Hebrew, and many languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia (see Semitic Languages). The Chadic branch, spoken mainly in northern Nigeria and adjacent areas, includes Hausa, one of the two most widely spoken languages of sub-Saharan Africa (the other being Swahili). Other subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic are Berber, Cushitic, and the single-language branch Egyptian, which contains the now-extinct language of the ancient Egyptians (see Egyptian Language; Coptic Language).

The Niger-Congo family covers most of sub-Saharan Africa and includes such widely spoken West African languages as Yoruba and Fulfulde, as well as the Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa, which include Swahili and Zulu. The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken mainly in eastern Africa, in an area between those covered by the Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo languages. The best-known Nilo-Saharan language is Masai, spoken by the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania. The Khoisan languages are spoken in the southwestern corner of Africa and include the Nama language (formerly called Hottentot).

F  Language Families of the Americas 

Most linguists separate the indigenous languages of the Americas into a large number of families and isolates, while one linguist has proposed grouping these languages into just three superfamilies. Nearly all specialists reject this proposal. Well-established families include Inuit-Aleut (Eskimaleut). The family stretches from the eastern edge of Siberia to the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and northern Canada to Greenland, where one variety of the Inuit language, Greenlandic, is an official language. The Na-Dené languages, the main branch of which comprises the Athapaskan languages, occupies much of northwestern North America. The Athapaskan languages also include, however, a group of languages in the southwestern United States, one of which is Navajo. Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the major indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan family is one of the main families of central North America.

The Uto-Aztecan family extends from the southwestern United States into Central America and includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec civilization and its modern descendants (see Aztec Empire). The Mayan languages are spoken mainly in southern Mexico and Guatemala (see Maya). Major language families of South America include Carib and Arawak in the north, and Macro-Gê and Tupian in the east. Guaraní, recognized as a national language in Paraguay alongside the official language, Spanish, is an important member of the Tupian family. In the Andes Mountains region, the dominant indigenous languages are Quechua and Aymara; the genetic relation of these languages to each other and to other languages remains controversial. See also Native American Languages.

G  Pidgin and Creole Languages 

Individual pidgin and creole languages pose a particular problem for genetic classification because the vocabulary and grammar of each comes from different sources. Consequently, many linguists do not try to classify them genetically. Pidgin and creole languages are found in many parts of the world, but there are particular concentrations in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the islands of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. English-based creoles such as Jamaican Creole and Guyanese Creole, and French-based creoles such as Haitian Creole, can be found in the Caribbean. English-based creoles are widespread in West Africa. About 10 percent of the population of Sierra Leone speaks Krio as a native language, and an additional 85 percent speaks it as a second language. The creoles of the Indian Ocean islands, such as Mauritius, are French-based. An English-based pidgin, Tok Pisin, is spoken by more than 2 million people in Papua New Guinea, making it the most widely spoken auxiliary language of that country. The inhabitants of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu speak similar varieties of Tok Pisin, called Pijin and Bislama, respectively.

H  International Languages 

International languages include both existing languages that have become international means of communication and languages artificially constructed to serve this purpose. The most famous and widespread artificial international language is Esperanto; however, the most widespread international languages are not artificial. In medieval Europe, Latin was the principal international language. Today, English is used in more countries as an official language or as the main means of international communication than any other language. French is the second most widely used language, largely due to the substantial number of African countries with French as their official language. Other languages have more restricted regional use, such as Spanish in Spain and Latin America, Arabic in the Middle East, and Russian in the republics of the former USSR.

VII  HOW LANGUAGES CHANGE 

Languages continually undergo changes, although speakers of a language are usually unaware of the changes as they are occurring. For instance, American English has an ongoing change whereby the pronunciation difference between the words cot and caught is being lost. The changes become more dramatic after longer periods of time. Modern English readers may require notes to understand fully the writings of English playwright William Shakespeare, who wrote during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The English of 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer differs so greatly from the modern language that many readers prefer a translation into modern English. Learning to read the writings of Alfred the Great, the 9th-century Saxon king, is comparable to acquiring a reading knowledge of German.

A  Sound Change 

Historical change can affect all components of language. Sound change is the area of language change that has received the most study. One of the major sound changes in the history of the English language is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. This shift, which occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, affected the pronunciation of all English long vowels (vowels that have a comparatively long sound duration). In Middle English, spoken from 1100 to 1500, the word house was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English word boot, while boot was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English boat. The change that affected the pronunciation of house also affected the vowels of mouse, louse, and mouth. This illustrates an important principle of sound change: It tends to be regular—that is, a particular sound change in a language tends to occur in the same way in all words.

The principle of the regularity of sound change has been particularly important to linguists when comparing different languages for genetic relatedness. Linguists compare root words from the different languages to see if they are similar enough to have once been the same word in a common ancestor language. By establishing that the sound differences between similar root words are the result of regular sound changes that occurred in the languages, linguists can support the conclusion that the different languages descended from the same original language. For example, by comparing the Latin word pater with its English translation, father, linguists might claim that the two languages are genetically related because of certain similarities between the two words. Linguists could then hypothesize that the Latin p had changed to f in English, and that the two words descended from the same original word. They could search for other examples to strengthen this hypothesis, such as the Latin word piscis and its English translation, fish, and the Latin pes and the English translation, foot. The sound change that relates f in the Germanic languages to p in most other branches of Indo-European is a famous sound change called Grimm's Law, named for German grammarian Jacob Grimm (see Grimm Brothers).

B  Morphological Change 

The morphology of a language can also change. An ongoing morphological change in English is the loss of the distinction between the nominative, or subject, form who and the accusative, or object, form whom. English speakers use both the who and whom forms for the object of a sentence, saying both “Who did you see?” and “Whom did you see?” However, English speakers use only the form who for a sentence's subject, as in “Who saw you?” Old English, the historical form of English spoken from about 700 to about 1100, had a much more complex morphology than modern English. The modern English word stone has only three additional forms: the genitive singular stone's, the plural stones, and the genitive plural stones'. All three of these additional forms have the same pronunciation. In Old English these forms were all different from one another: stan, stanes, stanas, and stana, respectively. In addition, there was a dative singular form stane and a dative plural form stanum, used, for instance, after certain prepositions, as in under stanum (under stones).

C  Syntactic Change 

Change can also affect syntax. In modern English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, as in the sentence “I know John.” The only other possible word order is object-subject-verb, as in “John I know (but Mary I don't).” Old English, by contrast, allowed all possible word order permutations, including subject-object-verb, as in Gif hie ænigne feld secan wolden, meaning “If they wished to seek any field,” or literally “If they any field to seek wished.” The loss of word-order freedom is one of the main syntactic changes that separates the modern English language from Old English.

D  Semantic and Lexical Change 

The meanings of words can also change. In Middle English, the word nice usually had the meaning “foolish,” and sometimes “shy,” but never the modern meaning “pleasant.” Change in the meanings of words is known as semantic change and can be viewed as part of the more general phenomenon of lexical change, or change in a language's vocabulary. Words not only can change their meaning but also can become obsolete. For example, modern readers require a note to explain Shakespeare's word hent (take hold of), which is no longer in use. In addition, new words can be created, such as feedback.

E  Change Due to Borrowing 

While much change takes place in a given language without outside interference, many changes can result from contact with other languages. Linguists use the terms borrowing and loan to refer to instances in which one language takes something from another language. The most obvious cases of borrowing are in vocabulary. English, for example, has borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from French and Latin. Most of these borrowed words are somewhat more scholarly, as in the word human (Latin humanus), because the commonly used words of any language are less likely to be lost or replaced. However, some of the words borrowed into English are common, such as the French word very, which replaced the native English word sore in such phrases as sore afraid, meaning “very frightened.” The borrowing of such common words reflects the close contact that existed between the English and the French in the period after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

Borrowing can affect not only vocabulary but also, in principle, all components of a language's grammar. The English suffix -er, which is added to verbs to form nouns, as in the formation of baker from bake, is ultimately a borrowing from the Latin suffix -arius. The suffix has been incorporated to such an extent, however, that it is used with indigenous words, such as bake, as well as with Latin words. Syntax also can be borrowed. For example, Amharic, a Semitic language of Ethiopia, has abandoned the usual Semitic word-order pattern, verb-subject-object, and replaced it with the word order subject-object-verb, borrowed from neighboring non-Semitic languages. Although in principle any component of language can be borrowed, some components are much more susceptible to borrowing than others. Cultural vocabulary is the most susceptible to borrowing, while morphology is the least susceptible.

F  Reconstructing Languages 

Linguistic reconstruction is the recovery of the stages of a language that existed prior to those found in written documents. Using a number of languages that are genetically related, linguists try to reconstruct at least certain aspects of the languages' common ancestor, called the protolanguage. Linguists theorize that those features that are the same among the protolanguage's descendant languages, or those features that differ but can be traced to a common origin, can be considered features of the ancestor language. Nineteenth-century linguistic science made significant progress in reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language. While many details of this reconstruction remain controversial, in general linguists have gained a good conception of Proto-Indo-European's phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. However, due to the range of syntactic variation among Proto-Indo-European's descendant languages, linguists have found syntactic reconstruction more problematic.

VIII  NONORAL LANGUAGE 

Language, although primarily oral, can also be represented in other media, such as writing. Under certain circumstances, spoken language can be supplanted by other media, as in sign language among the deaf (see Sign Language). Writing can be viewed in one sense as a more permanent physical record of the spoken language. However, written and spoken languages tend to diverge from one another, partly because of the difference in medium. In spoken language, the structure of a message cannot be too complex because of the risk that the listener will misunderstand the message. Since the communication is face-to-face, however, the speaker has the opportunity to receive feedback from the listener and to clarify what the listener does not understand. Sentence structures in written communication can be more complex because readers can return to an earlier part of the text to clarify their understanding. However, the writer usually does not have the opportunity to receive feedback from the reader and to rework the text, so texts must be written with greater clarity. An example of this difference between written and spoken language is found in languages that have only recently developed written variants. In the written variants there is a rapid increase in the use of words such as because and however in order to make explicit links between sentences—links that are normally left implicit in spoken language.

Sign languages, which differ from signed versions of spoken languages, are the native languages of most members of deaf communities. Linguists have only recently begun to appreciate the levels of complexity and expressiveness found in sign languages. In particular, as in oral languages, sign languages are generally arbitrary in their use of signs: In general, no reason exists, other than convention, for a certain sign to have a particular meaning. Sign languages also exhibit dual patterning, in which a small number of components combine to produce the total range of signs, similar to the way in which letters combine to make words in English. In addition, sign languages use complex syntax and can discuss the same wide range of topics possible in spoken languages.

Body language refers to the conveying of messages through body movements other than those movements that form a part of sign or spoken languages. Some gestures can have quite specific meanings, such as those for saying good-bye or for asking someone to approach. Other gestures more generally accompany speech, such as those used to emphasize a particular point. Although there are cross-cultural similarities in body language, substantial differences also exist both in the extent to which body language is used and in the interpretations given to particular instances of body language. For example, the head gestures for “yes” and “no” used in the Balkans seem inverted to other Europeans. Also, the physical distance kept between participants in a conversation varies from culture to culture: A distance considered normal in one culture can strike someone from another culture as aggressively close.

In certain circumstances, other media can be used to convey linguistic messages, particularly when normal media are unavailable. For example, Morse code directly encodes a written message, letter by letter, so that it can be transmitted by a medium that allows only two values—traditionally, short and long signals or dots and dashes (see Morse Code, International). Drums can be used to convey messages over distances beyond the human voice's reach—a method known as drum talk. In some cases, such communication methods serve the function of keeping a message secret from the uninitiated. This is often the case with whistle speech, a form of communication in which whistling substitutes for regular speech, usually used for communication over distances.


Contributed By:
Bernard Comrie
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