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