LINGUIS 155AC Chapter Notes - Chapter 0: Mutual Intelligibility
30 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
Object of linguistics is finding the boundaries of diversity in human language. There is no exact number for defining the number of languages. > reasons include: areas remain unexplored in the world, defining a language is complex. We have thousands of languages, and the number keeps growing as we increasingly understand how languages are actually being spoken in specific boundaries. Family: group of languages related to one another. Example: indo-european family -> english belongs to this family. Languages aren"t uniformly distributed amongst families and geography. Example: europe speaks about 230 languages, whereas asia has 2,197. Many nations are multilingual ex: france, america, china. As of right now languages are constantly disappearing from the world. Languages disappear when young generations stop learning them i. e. indigenous. When languages go extinct a community, its cultures are lost as well. What makes languages different is mores sociopolitical issue. Example: chinese dialects aren"t mutually intelligible but they all have one nation in common.
