LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Koyra Chiini Language, Phoneme, Universal Grammar
Thursday, November 8th, 2017
Language Variation and Linguistic Typology:
Languages of the world:
• How many languages are there in the world?
• 7099 - according to Ethnologue, a catalogue of the worlds languages
• Naturall theres a uee distriutio of these laguages aross the gloe – some areas
have more, some areas have less
• Geographic distribution of languages:
Hot spots of linguistic diversity
• Some areas of the world simply have a lot of languages
• For example, there are 840 languages spoken on the New Guinea alone.
Languages of New Guinea
• How many languages are there in the world?
• According to Ethnologue,
Most populous languages
• 10 languages with the largest number of speakers
Rank
Language
Speakers (millions)
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1
Mandarin
898
2
Spanish
437
3
English
372
4
Hindi
260
5
Bengali
242
6
Por tuguese
219
7
Russian
154
8
Japanese
128
9
Punjabi
92.7
10
Javanese
84.4
Complications to counting speakers
• These counts are complicated by the factors we discussed on Monday
• For example, grouped together Arabic would have 295 million speakers – that would put it
in 4th place
• However: different local varieties of Arabic are not mutually intelligible, and are therefore
counted separately
• The difference between e.g. Algerian Colloquial Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic is
reported to be like that between e.g. Spanish and Portuguese
Endangered languages
• On the other end of the spectrum, there is an enormous number of languages at risk of
disappearing – these are endangered languages
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• The Endangered Language Project estimates that 40% of the worlds languages are at risk of
disappearing within the next century
• While languages disappearance is a natural process, this rate of loss is alarming and
accelerated beyond a natural rate
• We will discuss language endangerment and loss later in the semester
How can languages vary?
• In light of the number of languages found in the world, our hypothesis about innateness has
to say something about this kind of variation
• What linguists have found is that variation is constrained
• There limits to how languages can vary, and languages vary in predictable ways
• There are also proposed language universals – absolute limits on variation or features that
every language shares
Linguistic Typology
• Linguistic typology is the study of cross-linguistic variation
• Comparing languages with each other with respect to a given linguistic phenomenon and
based on representative samples.
• Classifying observed cross-linguistic variation into types (phonological, morphological,
syntactic, semantic, lexical, pragmatic etc.).
• Formulating generalizations over the distribution (what is attested/how frequently) of
linguistic patterns across the languages of the world and their relationship to other
patterns.
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