The world’s languages Summer 202

University of Innsbruck
Über die Sprachen der Welt
4

Formalities
❖ 90-minute lecture every week
❖ Tuesdays — 3:30 - 5 pm — Hörsaal
❖ Slides will be available on OLAT every week — after the lectur
❖ No textbooks, etc. require
❖ Final exam: June 25 (additional dates: July 11, October 4
❖ Any questions → [email protected] (Room 40419)

 Introduction:
What are languages?
What is Language?
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Introduction
❖ Current global estimate:
❖ 7,654 languages spoken nativel
❖ 223 signed language
❖ Various non-native languages: pidgins, mixed language
❖ Total natural human languages: ~ 8,00
❖ (Human population without language: not documented)

Introduction
❖ Languages unequally distributed across the world (historically):
Country Number of languages
Papua New Guinea 856
Indonesia 688
Evans, Nicholas. 2022. Nigeria 480
Words of wonder:
India 390
Endangered languages
and what they tell us.
Australia 353
2nd edn. Hoboken: China 304
Wiley-Blackwell. P. 16. Mexico 293
Cameroon 241
USA 227
Brazil 218
Total 4,050
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Introduction

❖ One count: 60% of languages are concentrated in 17 countries,

which account for only 27% of the world population and 9% of
the world’s territor
❖ Almost 2/3 of all languages are spoken in Asia or Africa, but
85% of people speak a European or an Asian languag
❖ Median number of speakers per language: ~ 7,500

Introduction
❖ What is a language
❖ Dif cult to say — all categories in linguistics are gradien
❖ Different languages or different dialects of the same language
❖ “Standard German” — Tyrolea
❖ Tyrolean — Viennes
❖ “Standard German” — Viennese
fi
?

Introduction

❖ “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy

❖ — Max Weinreich (1945
❖ Yiddish original: A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un ot
❖ Meaning: linguistically speaking, there are only dialects; some
dialects are classi ed as “languages” because they have social/
cultural/political prestige fi
)

Introduction

❖ Some famous cases in Europe (amongst many others)

❖ Balkans: Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin = same
language on linguistic criteria, but each one (often) felt to be
different from the others by the respective communitie
❖ Scandinavia: Norwegian and Swedish = very similar, but
distinguished because spoken in different countries
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Introduction

❖ Further issues in identifying/counting languages

❖ Ancient languages (+8,000 years ago) essentially unknow
❖ Some languages might still be unknown outside the relevant
speech community — increasingly unlikely these day
❖ Language loss (i.e., languages are lost when their last speaker
dies) — very common these days
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Focus: Language loss

❖ About 25% of all languages have fewer than 1,000 users; (most
of) these languages are bound to be extinct within a few decade
❖ Prediction: between 50% and 90% of all languages — i.e., several
thousand — will have gone extinct by the end of the 21st century
❖ Disaster both for users of those languages and for scienc
❖ Language death: term rejected by language users concerned
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Focus: Language loss

❖ Main reason(s) for language loss

❖ Language shift: users abandon language A in favor of B for
economic/practical reasons; i.e., B has more prestige and/or
comes with more professional/ nancial opportunitie
❖ No transmission of A from one generation to the nex
❖ No language revitalization efforts for A

fi
 13

Focus: Language loss

❖ Traditional classi cation of language endangerment:
Category Rating Description
> 1,000,000 speakers OR of cial language of
safe A+
monolingual nation (e.g., Icelandic)
stable A Spoken by all ages, children and older
unstable, eroded A- Some areas where children speak the language
de nitively endangered B Spoken only by parental generation and older
severely endangered C Spoken only by grandparental generation and older
critically endangered D Spoken only by a few, of great-grandparent generation
extinct E No speakers
fi
fi
fi
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Focus: Language loss

❖ Only about a third of all languages are not endangered:

https://glottolog.org/
langdoc/statu

(02/15/2024)
s

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Focus: Language loss

❖ Language loss primarily driven by a few dozen “big” languages

(= national languages with a high level of prestige, an of cial
orthography, many million native users, etc.)
❖ English vs. Irish (and many others); German vs. Frisian; Italian
vs. Ladin; French vs. Breton; Spanish vs. Basqu
❖ Also beyond Europe: Swahili, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, etc.
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Focus: Language loss

❖ Major consequences of language loss

❖ Science in general: speci c knowledge encoded in a language
will be gone (e.g., edibility/healing properties of local plants
❖ Linguistics in particular: understanding of where, how, and to
what extent languages vary is weakene
❖ Individuals: connection to native culture is severed

fi
 17

Focus: Language loss

❖ Only viable solution: of cially recognized multilingualis

❖ Dif cult where country/nation/language are thought of as a
single coherent unit (e.g., much of Europe
❖ Multilingualism: the rule, not the exception, in many places
(for instance, due to exogamy
❖ Dif cult in countries with hundreds of native languages
fi
fi
fi
)

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Introduction

❖ Workaround adopted in linguistics to delineate languages

❖ “Mutual intelligibility
❖ Speakers of variety A can communicate with speakers of variety
B and vice versa → A and B = dialects of the same languag
❖ Speakers of variety A cannot communicate with speakers of
variety B or vice versa → A and B = different languages

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Introduction

❖ Mutual intelligibility: not a real solutio

❖ Some speakers of “Standard German” will fail to understand
Tyrolean (but not vice versa) → same or different language
❖ Same problem found across the globe (for English, Arabic, etc.
❖ Unfortunate tendency: European varieties = “languages,” but
varieties elsewhere = “dialects”
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Introduction

❖ In sum
❖ Number of ~ 8,000 languages might be far off the mark (effects
of language shift/loss probably underestimated
❖ If speakers were to judge mutual intelligibility, number of
languages might change drastically (in either direction
❖ Cover term for languages and dialects → “varieties”
:

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Introduction
❖ Many parallels between languages and biological species
❖ What is a species
❖ How many species are there
❖ Which species are related (and at what time depth)
❖ What is the environmental impact on the shape of species
❖ Extinction of species
?

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Introduction

❖ Further parallel: areas with many languages also have many

native species such as higher vertebrate
❖ Top 10 in both lists: Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Indi
❖ Areas of both linguistic and biological diversity: Central and
South America, tropical Africa, South and Southeast Asia (all the
way through Australia and to Western Paci c)
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Introduction

❖ A note on sign(ed) languages

❖ Same kind of system as spoken languages (i.e., every idea can
be expressed in every spoken and every signed language
❖ Often recent; less well documented, researched, understood;
comparison with spoken languages yet to be fully develope
❖ Users of signed languages = “signers” (or “speakers”)

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Introduction

❖ Another major issue: what is Language (i.e., the mental and

physical capacity to use individual languages)
❖ Traditional idea: human language is de ned by a number of
“design features” — all human languages have all of them; no
animal communication system has any of the
❖ Number/nature of design features: subject of ongoing research
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Introduction

❖ Many design features suggested; focus here on a subse

❖ Design feature 1: Productivit
❖ Humans can communicate about experiences that are new to
them (new objects, new environments, new activities, etc.
❖ Animals are restricted in terms of their communicative range,
which does not expand throughout their lifespan

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Introduction

❖ Design feature 2: Cultural transmissio

❖ Humans develop their speech/sign system via interaction
with other humans (parents/caretakers, peers, etc.
❖ Animal communication: skills mostly innate (i.e., xed and
stable from rst to last day)
fi
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Introduction

❖ Design feature 3: Displacemen

❖ Humans can communicate about objects and events that are
not tied to the here-and-now; e.g., Jupiter, unicorns, concepts
like ‘last week,’ etc
❖ Animal communication: restricted to the individual speech
situation in both time and place
.

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Introduction

❖ Design feature 4: Arbitrarines

❖ The forms of human language are not generally tied to the
meanings they express: butter y vs. papillon vs. mariposa vs.
Schmetterling — this is what makes translation necessar
❖ Animal communication = iconic: form is tied to meaning; e.g.,
length of bee dance correlates with distance from food source

fl
s

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Introduction
❖ Important: Arbitrariness also holds in signed languages (at least
to the extent that it does in spoken languages)

Anderson, Stephen. 2012.

Languages: A very short
introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. P. 95.

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Introduction

❖ Design feature 5: Double articulation (or: duality of patterning

❖ Human language combines elements at two different levels:
meaningless sounds like /a/, /r/, /m/ are joined to produce
words like arm, which then combine into clauses/sentence
❖ Animal communication has only one level of patterning: every
sound (essentially) has a meaning