the eight major language families because love isn’t really an international langauge

The Eight Major

Language Families

Because LOVE Isn’t Really An

International Langauge

It is important to know: THE EIGHT MAJOR LANGUAGE FAMILIES AND THE GLOBAL PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE WHO SPEAK THEMTHE GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE EIGHT MAJOR LANGUAGE FAMILIESTWO OR THREE EXAMPLE LANGUAGES WITHIN EACH MAJOR FAMILYTWO OR THREE COUNTRIES WHERE EACH EXAMPLE LANGUAGE IS SPOKEN

The Eight Major Language Families are:

FOR STARTERS

GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION

OF MAJOR FAMILIES

Indo European has Eight branches…

Hindi in IndiaBengali in Bangladesh

Punjabi in PakistanPersian in Iran

French in FranceSpanish in Spain

Portuguese in PortugalItalian in Italy

Russian in RussiaPolish in Poland

Bosnian in Bosnia

German in GermanyEnglish all over the place

Swedish in SwedenScottish Gaelic in Scotland

Irish Gaelic in IrelandGreek in GreeceArmenian in ArmeniaAlbanian in Albania

FAMILIESLANUAGES AND

COUNTRIES

We’ve already spoken about Indo European Family languages, but for the sake of review:

Indo-IranianRomanceGermanicBalto-SlavicCelticGreekArmenianAlbanian

The Sino-Tibetan family has three branches:

The Sinitic Branch: Chinese in China

The Austro-Thai Branch: Thai in Thailand

The Tibeto-Burman Branch: Burmese in Burma

There are a number of Chinese languages, but ¾ of Chinese peoples speak Mandarin Chinese, and the government is imposing Mandarin country-wide.

All Chinese languages are written in the same form using characters called ideograms.

SINO-TIBETANLANUAGES

Japanese uses three separates sets of alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

One of them was inherited from the Chinese ideograms, but the other two are purely phonetic.

Japanese partly developed from Chinese in isolation. It is spoken on the Islands of Japan.

JAPANESE

Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken in the North African and Southwest Asian portions of the world. They include:

Arabic in the Arabian Peninsula and Northern Africa

Its languages were used to write the Tanakh (The Hebrew Bible), the Bible, and the Qur’an (the Muslim Bible).

AFRO-ASIATICLANGUAGES

Hebrew in Israel

Altaic languages are spoken in an 8,000 kilometer band from Turkey in the west to Mongolia and Northern China in the east.

The family includes:

Turkmen in Turkmenistan

Uzbek in Uzbekistan

Kazakh in Kazakhstan

Uyghur in the Xinjiang region of Northern China

Mongolian in the South Mongolian region of Northern China

When the Soviets governed the Altaic region, they suppressed Altaic languages to create a centripetal, homogenous national culture.They also forced Altaic speakers to write in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. Most Altaic speakers are Muslims and many Altaic languages use the Arabic alphabet.With the all of the Soviet Union, Altaic languages became the official languages in many former Soviet Republics.

ALTAICLANGUAGES

Turkish in Turkey

Many of these regions are shatterbelts (areas prone to civil war due to internal clashes between irreconcilable ethnic groups) because:

--restoring the Altaic languages threatens the rights of minorities in these countries--the borders of the states formed often do not coincide well with the regions in which the languages are spoken

In these cases, languages acts like a centrifugal force

There are at least 1000 distinct languages in Africa

Most of these languages lack a written tradition, and only eight are spoken by more than 10 million people.

In Northern Africa, Arabic, an Afro-Asiatic Language dominates. Niger-Congo languages dominate in the Sub Saharan Africa. (95%)

There are six branches of the Niger-Congo Family.

Shona in ZimbabweZulu in South AfricaSwahili in Tanzania

Swahili is the first language of only 800,000 people in Tanzania, but it is used as a second language by almost 30 million Africans.

Local languages are used to communicate with neighbors, but Swahili is used as a way to communicate between outsiders from other areas and tribes.

NIGER-CONGOLANGUAGES

Yoruba and Igbo in Nigeria

Austronesian languages are primarily spoken in Southeast Asia.

There are 739 Austronesian languages including:

Javanese on the island of Java in IndonesiaIndonesian (as a second, trade language) in IndonesiaMalay in MalaysiaMalagasy in Madagascar

AUSTRONESIANLANGUAGES

We won’t say much about them here, but there are about 17 Dravidian Languages.

4% of the world’s population speaks one of them.

They are clustered mostly in southern India and represent the languages of India’s original inhabitants.

India has 18 official languages, four of which are Dravidian (in red).

DRAVIDIANLANGUAGES

CASE STUDY:NIGERIA

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and it will be a top 10 country by 2050.

It has 493 distinct languages, only three of which have widespread use.Hausa: (Afro-Asiatic) 15% in the NorthYoruba: (Niger-Congo) 15% in the SouthwestIgbo: (Niger-Congo) 15% in the Southeast

The peoples of different language groups have often fought. Southern Ibos tried to secede in the 1960s, northerners claim that Southern Yorubas discriminate against them.

In Nigeria language differences create a CENTRIFUGAL force and threaten to shatter the country.

To calm the country, the government moved its capital from Lagos in the Yoruban dominated southwest to the more centralized Abuja.It is a former English colony and English is the official language.