Linguistics 1028A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Markedness, Polysynthetic Language, Dialect Continuum

• School: Western University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: Linguistics 1028A/B
• Professor: Stephanie Kelly

Document Summary

Classification of languages: dialect continuum: a language divided by political, time, or physical boundaries. With lots of time they might not be intelligible: mutual intelligibility: speakers of 2 varieties can understand each other, genetically related languages: come from the same language family. Share same mother language: linguistic diversity: difference and sameness of language, about 7000 living languages. Linguistics group the languages using dialect continuum, phonological differences, genetically relatedness between 2+ languages, etc: mandarin is the most spoken language. L1) (second language l2): mandarin is in first. Types of classification: genetic classification: classifying languages according to their decent, ex. Albanian: areal classification: characteristics by language geographical proximity. Neighbouring languages can come to resemble each other, even though they may not be genetically related: linguistic typology: pg. Group together languages with similar characteristics: structural characteristics that occur in all/almost all languages, sound patterns, morpheme patterns, syntactic patterns.