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“How many languages are there in the world?”
Anderson, S. R 2004. Linguistics Society of America
retrieved from: http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-faqs-howmany.cfm
According to the text
- (^) Why is it assumed that the majority of languages belong to the Indo- European family?
Because that language is the best known family. English, for example belongs it. On the other hand, the Indo-European languages are distributed geographically and they have influence in world affairs. But this is not true, there are about 200 Indo-European languages.
- When can a language be deemed critically endangered or moribund? Why is it important to preserve endangered languages? [you can read more about it here]
The linguistic diversity is declining increasingly. We can say that a language is deemed when young children don’t learn it, it has mean that that language is not learnt to the new generations.
A good example would be the Hebrew.
It is important to avoid that a language disappear because when that happens the community’s connection with its past, traditions and so on disappear with it.
- What did Max Weinrich imply when he said that “a language is a dialect with an army a navy”?
He said that because the difference between language and dialect involves issues of statehood, economics, literary traditions and writing systems, and other trappings of power, authority and culture — with purely linguistic considerations playing a less significant role.
- Why is mutual intelligibility not especially useful to distinguish languages?
The mutual intelligibility is about that if the speakers of one language can understand the speakers of the other one without difficulty, they are the same language. But this is not true. Sometimes, speakers of one language can understand the other one but not vice versa. For example, Bulgarians and Macedonian. Bulgarians say that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian, but they insist that it is a distinct language.
Another reason why the criterion of mutual intelligibility fails to tell us how many distinct languages there are in the world is the existence of dialect continua. Regions which are closer can understand each to other but not regions which are faster.
- How can grammar help distinguishing “forms” of the same language from different ]languages?
Some aspects of grammatical knowledge, like the way pronouns are interpreted with respect to another expression in the same sentence, seem to be common across languages.
On the other hand, the fact that adjectives precede their nouns in English (we say a red balloon, not a balloon red) is a fact about English, since the opposite is true, for instance, in French.
- Are there 6, 809 languages in the world, as the Ethnologue catalog affirms?
We can’t know that. We can’t know how many languages are exactly in the world because every day some languages die and other languages are born.
But in fact, what makes languages distinct from one another turns out to be much more a social and political issue than a linguistic one, and most of the cited numbers are matters of opinion rather than science. The late Max Weinreich used to say that “
One common-sense notion of when we are dealing with different languages, as opposed to different forms of the same language, is the criterion of mutual intelligibility: if the speakers of A can understand the speakers of B without difficulty, A and B must be the same language.
But this notion fails in practice to cut the world up into clearly distinct language units. In some instances, speakers of A can understand B, but not vice versa, or at least speakers of B will insist that they cannot. Bulgarians, for instance, consider Macedonian a dialect of Bulgarian, but Macedonians insist that it is a distinct language
Very different languages can share words (through borrowing) while different speakers of the “same” language may vary widely in their vocabulary due to
