lecture 7- languages Flashcards
what is language?
- a system of communication
Speech, movement, sound symbols
5 things language can indicate
Time
Gender
Connections
Quantity
Place
centripetal force (languages)
Languages can unify people
Centrifugal force: languages
Language can also push/pull people away
- ex. in a place where you don’t speak the language
how many languages spoken worldwide?
7000
Institutional language
=used in education, work, media, government
-needs to be a literary tradition (written and spoken) to be used in institutions
-can be an official language
-standardized
“Accepted language”
what does an institutional language need to be?
literary tradition (written and spoken)
Stable language
=language is being consistently passed down through generations
- even if very few people speak the language
Endangered language
= threatened/dying out
–> the younger generations are not learning the language
- even if a lot of people currently speak the language
Language family=
collection of languages related through a common ancestral language
Language branch=
collection of languages within a family
Language group=
collection of languages in a branch that share a common origin
Taxonomy of languages:
many branches
Writing systems
- collection of organized symbols
–> letters (organized into sounds, alphabet, or syllabary system)
Ex. English, Greek, cyrillic
–> logograms (symbol that represent words or meaningful parts of words)
Ex. Chinese, hieroglyphs, emojis?
what can the map of language families tell us about?
historical migration
Romance languages=
language of the Roman’s
- derived from Latin
- share a lot of base words from Latin
Why are languages segregated/different despite being derived from the same language?
due to geographic features that physically separates the people in these regions
History of english language
–> old English was a Germanic language; basically, impossible for us to read now
–> middle English; more standardized, “a knights tale”, written English was a new concept, emergence of modern English
–> modern English
most broadly spoken language in the world
English
2B people live in a country where english is the official language
official language in 56 countries
most prominent language on the internet
English
Lingua Franca
= language of the franks, middle eastern traders used this when communicating with European traders
Pidgin language
= simplified form of lingua franca, to communicate with speakers of another language, for governance and trade
Creole language
= a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into new forms
Dialect
= a regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation
Accent
= describes a distinct way of pronunciation, does not include differences in vocabulary or grammar
what 3 things cause accent diversity?
- accent diversity caused by time
-isolated communities have very different accents
-settlement patterns and geographic features cause accent diversity
Vocabulary
= body of words in a particular language
Canada bilingual French and English autonomy
both recognized as an official language
need to have French and English food labels on food in Canada)
language laws
-The charter of the French language -Bill 101
Joual
spoken Quebecois
how many indigenous languages spoken in Canada?
over 60
Endangered languages and preservation:
- between 2000-3000 languages are endangered
- all of the 60 indigenous languages are endangered because younger generations are not learning them
Inuit languages
- system of closely interrelated dialect
- further displaced geographically= less likely to understand eachother
-100,000 speakers
Preserving inuit language by using a writing system
- Inuktitut syllabics
-based on cree syllabics - it is digitized in Unicode, this helps preserve the language
- Inuktitut is recognized/can be used in government documents
Indigenous Language Act
to preserve, promote and revitalize indigenous languages
