Key Issue 1 Chapter 5

o Language is a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds

that a group of people understands to have the same meaning.
o Literary traditions are systems of written communication.
o Some languages lack this
o Many countries designate at least one language as their official language
o This is the language that is used by the government for laws, reports, and
public objects.
o A country with multiple official languages may need all public documents
to be in all languages.
o Earths heterogeneous collection of languages is one of the most obvious examples
of cultural diversity.
o The world has about 6,909 languages.
o Only 11 of these languages are spoken by at least 100 million people
o Languages are broken down into families, branches, and groups:
o Language families are collections of languages related through a common
ancestral language that existed long before recorded history
o Language branches are collection of languages within a family related
through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years
ago.
Differences are not as extensive or old as between language
families.
o Language groups are collections of languages within a branch that share a
common origin in the relatively recent past and display many similarities
in grammar and vocabulary.
Classification of Languages:
o Two-thirds of the people in the world speak a language that belongs to the IndoEuropean or Sino-Tibetan language family.
o A researcher in New Zealand speculates that all languages can ultimately be traced
back to Africa
Distribution of Language Families:
o Indo-European:
o The most widely used language family
o Predominant in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin America
o Sino-Tibetan
o Encompasses languages spoken in the Peoples Republic of China and
smaller countries in Southeast Asia.
o Mandarin is the most commonly used Chinese language because about
three-fourths of the Chinese population speaks it.
o The relatively low number of languages in China is a source of national
strength and unity.
This is also fostered by a common written language, all languages
in China are written the same
o Logograms are symbols that represent words, or meaningful parts of
words, rather than sounds like English.

The ability to read a book requires knowledge of several thousand

logograms.
Other Asian Language Families:
o Austronesian:
o These languages are spoken by about 6 percent of the worlds people,
mainly in Indonesian.
Indonesias most widely used language is Javanese, spoken by 85
million people
o Austro-Asiatic:
o Spoken by about 2 percent of the worlds population, these languages are
based in Southeast Asia
o Vietnamese is the most-spoken tongue of this language family.
o Tai Kadai:
o Originally classified as a branch of Sino-Tibetan
o Similar to Austronesian languages
o Japanese:
o Written in part with Chinese logograms, Japanese also uses two systems of
phonetic symbols, like Western Languages
o Chinese cultural traits have diffused into Japanese society, but the
structure of the two languages differ
o Korean:
o Not written with logograms but in a system known as hankul.
Each letter represents a sound, like Western languages
o More than half of the Korean language derives from Chinese words.
Languages of Southeast Asia and North Africa and Central Asia:
o Afro-Asiatic and Altaic are the two largest language families in Southwest Asia
and North Africa. Uralic languages were once classified with Altaic.
o Afro-Asiatic:
Arabic is the major language of this family, it is an official
language in two dozen countries of Southwest Asia and North
Africa
This family also includes Hebrew, the language of the Bible.
o Altaic:
When the Soviet Union governed most of the Altaic-speaking
region of Central Asia, use of those languages was suppressed to
create a homogeneous national culture.
o Uralic:
Indo-European speakers, except for Estonia, Finland, and Hungary,
dominate every European country.
The people in these countries speak languages that belong
to the Uralic family.
African Language Families:
o It is unclear as to how many languages are spoken in Africa, most of them lack a
written tradition though.

o Niger-Congo:
o More than 95 percent of the people in sun-Saharan Africa speak languages
from this family.
o In rural areas, local languages are used to communicate with others
nearby, while Swahili is used to talk to outsiders.
o Nilo-Saharan:
o A few million people in north-central Africa speak these languages.
o Despite few speakers, this family is divided into six branches, plus
numerous groups and sub-groups.
o Khoisan:
o A distinctive characteristic of these languages is the use of clicking
sounds.