There are 8,475 languages that we know of
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Health Society & Culture Environment Technology Agriculture & Fisheries Natural Sciences Blogs RESEARCH & STUDY There are 8,475 languages that we know of August 25, 2018 - 06:25 What do we know about the new languages that are appearing and how does a new language form? Researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, are investigating just this. Keywords: languages, Researcher Zone SendPDFPrint By: Peter Bakker, Associate Professor, department of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark.
If every country on Earth spoke just one language, there would be 193 languages spoken today. But there are actually 8,475 and counting. (Photo: Shutterstock) In Italy they speak Italian. In Germany they speak German, and in Denmark, Danish. If this was true for all other countries, there would be 193 languages spoken today.
But in reality, there are many more: 8,475 according to glottolog.org, where linguists map languages from around the world.
In fact few countries speak just one or two languages natively, such as Iceland and Denmark. Besides their mother tongue, most people there also speak English.
And if that was not confusing enough, new languages are being developed all the time. For example, so-called creole languages, which arise when two or more groups of people all with their own languages come in contact with each other, and need to communicate.
In our research group at Aarhus University, Denmark, we compared these newly developed grammars with non-creole languages from around the world.
The results were spectacular.
A diversity of languages around the world Even though many of us speak just one or perhaps two languages, in ten countries around the world there are more than 200 spoken languages, including Cameroun, Nigeria, USA (including Native American languages), and Indonesia.
Papua New Guinea is the current record holder for the number of spoken languages. With a population of eight million, a little more than that of Denmark or Scotland, they speak no fewer than 800 languages! And they are all very different.
Some languages sound very similar, have similar words, and stem from the same proto-language, where dialects have developed into different languages.
Linguists refer to related languages as coming from the same linguistic family. For example, Danish belongs to the Indo-European family, just like almost all languages spoken between Ireland and Bengal, including Armenian in the Black Sea region and Urdu in Pakistan.
Any language can be viewed as a tool that we humans use to talk about anything in the Universe and fictional worlds.
Some languages have no numerals or adjectives, others have 30 ways of forming a plural and others have none at all. Some have 15,000 different verb tenses and others have no tenses. And some languages have just 10 different sounds (Pirah in the Amazon), while others have 112 (Taa and !X in Southern Africa).
But this incredible diversity of languages is far from static.
Read More:Evolutionary biology can help us understand how language works
Linguists fear language death Linguists are pessimistic about the prospect of maintaining the current diversity of languages.
People chose to speak a language that gives better job prospects, and forget that this does not mean they have to say farewell to other languages spoken by their parents.
Some researchers estimate that just 10 per cent of the worlds languages will survive this century.
An average language is spoken by somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people. So even a language like Danish with five million speakers is actually one of the worlds biggest languages--larger than 90 per cent of all other world languages.
While many languages die out, new languages also emerge. And seeing how these new languages have originated over the past 500 years opens a fascinating window on peoples cognitive abilities.
Tok Pisin is a creole language spoken in the northern Papua New Guinea.
Creole language: The newborn of languages When two or more groups of people with different languages come into contact with each other, the resulting language is called a creole when people start speaking it as their mother tongue or a default language in the community.
Such a situation has occurred many times and there are perhaps 100 known creole languages.
It typically starts among adults who do not share a common tongue, such as soldiers, traders, workers, students, or slaves. Some of them can be relatively powerful people, such as plantation owners, slave traders, or army commanders, who exert more influence than others. And everyone else learns their vocabulary.
In these situations, no authority tells people how to conjugate their verbs. Their need to communicate with each other outweighs the desire to learn to speak each others language correctly. Instead, they create a new one that is easier to pick up using the language of the most powerful group as a basis.
Read More:What is the worlds weirdest language?
The recipe for creole The recipe to create a new creole language is logical and simple. It is pretty easy to learn words, but its not so easy to learn grammar and various conjugations, clauses, grammatical genders, and irregular rules. So you just forget about them.
For example, you can imagine a worker who needs to explain to his or her colleague that he is going to start work on the plantation soon. He has learnt a little English, but he cannot say I will go and work on the plantation.
Instead, he can say by-and-by me go work plantation. He uses the vocabulary from the boss whose language everyone knows to a limited extent, but not the correct grammar, and often redundant peculiarities like gender, clauses, and other complicated parts of the language. This is what occurred with English in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean.
First, you develop a simplified pattern of communication, where you prioritise prominent and emphatic wordsthose that are emphasised by the leader or boss. So instead of will, you might say by-and-by to indicate that something is happening in the future. Instead of I you use the more emphatic me. Prepositions, such as at or the can be dropped. And perhaps over time this evolves to mi ba-wok planteshen.
All the words come from English, but the grammar is new. By-and-by has turned into ba, and is placed close to the verb.
Other examples from Scandinavia Here are two other examples from Scandinavia.
A pidgin called Russenorsk developed in northern Norway during the 17th century. In this contact language you might use the Russian moja my to mean me, instead of the Norwegian jeg I or the Russian word pian meaning to drink , which in Norwegian is drikke.
But Russian-Norwegian never developed into a full creole language.
Another example developed in 16th century Danish West Indies, where Danish replaced certain Dutch words to form a Dutch-based creole language known as Die Creol taal.
Read More:Fight on to preserve Elfdalian, Sweden's lost forest language
Creole languages are unique In our research, we have compared creole languages with a large selection of non-creole languages for which we were able to collect data.
Looking at multiple combinations of creole and non-creole languages, we can see that there is always a small space where (almost) all creole languages are found, and no non-creole languages.
We have used databases with thousands of data on grammatical trends of hundreds of languages, and we never see an overlap of traits, where creole languages cluster with non-creoles.
We have looked at Arabic-based, Dutch-based, French-based, Spanish-based, and Portuguese-based creoles, as well as their dialects and colonial variants.
In every case, creole is distinct to the non-creole. This surprised us, as we had expected to see overlap between languages from Africa and Asia that superficially resembled creole.
In Germany, linguists have done the same exercise for English creole, and their results agree. We have also compared creoles with non-creoles that similarly do not use verb conjugations, cases or grammatical genders, and still, the creole languages are distinct.
Does the human brain use universal grammar? Some argue that creole is structurally influenced by African languages, associated with slaves.
There are clear influences from these languages. But when you look at many traits simultaneously the impact from Africa is surprisingly small, even though quite a few of them are spoken by people of African origin. Creole languages created by people from Africa more closely resemble other creole languages in Asia than the African languages spoken by these enslaved people.
This similarity across different types of creole all over the world suggests that people all around the world use the same cognitive skills when they create a new grammatical system.
And this is a fascinating thought.
Our research has revealed that a language can be described as a creole if it meets these conditions:
It has a verb for to have (only 25 per cent of languages have this) It has an indefinite article a that equates to the number one (40 per cent of the worlds languages have this) It does not have any verb tenses (for example, there is no formal distinction between I buy or I bought) It does not have a separate word for not (about half of all world languages have this) None of these traits are rare, but only in creole languages do we find all of them together. Many are found in European languages.
Clearly, people build new languages in the same way in Africa as they do in Asia, America, and Australia, even though the vocabulary comes from different source languages.
Read this article in Danish at ForskerZonen, part of Videnskab.dk
Country Denmark Translated by Catherine Jex Related content
Life or death for languages Children do not automatically learn a second language Evolutionary biology can help us understand how language works English is a Scandinavian language Children with weak language skills less likely to play with other children
Scientific literature
'Creole Studies: Phylogenetic Approaches.' Bakker, Peter et al., John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017 'The morphosyntax of varieties of English worldwide: A quantitative perspective', Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Kortmann, Bernd, Lingua, 2009. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2007.09.016 External links
Peter Bakker
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Hi Bob, Indeed this article is slightly over the top. First linguists are not agreed on what constitutes a language. Wycliffe ethnologue was at 6,000 something if I remember right, and many languages are dying, so the 8000+ seems high. Then again in Ivory Coast itself, Bete, Georges' language is considered one language when I am sure by all true linguistic standards, it is probably at least 3 different languages, so maybe they are right. I laugh because in BT when it comes to projects SIL seems to be "dividers" or "separaters" (they do many BT for one group) where UBS tends to be "putter togethers". This comes from SIL emphasis on "every tribe" but I personally think we would be more successful if we followed socio-linguistic tendencies and tried to put more together. Because of financial, time, and practical constraints...and also because it is hard (here at least) to maintain and promote African languages, given the historical colonial anti mother tongue attitude (even among native speakers til today) especially in francophone countries...
The other parts of the article raise a few eyebrows ...there is a funny insinuation that slaves are the ones to develop creoles, which is kind of odd, to say the least....of course they are right to say
"Creole languages created by people from Africa more closely resemble other creole languages in Asia than the African languages spoken by these enslaved people."
but these enslaved people? means what????!!!!! Sierra Leone has a very prominent creole language and no slaves today anyway....My sociologist friend Anna Shnukal and I were the first linguists (in the early 70s) to document that Nigerian Pidgin had morphed into a real Creole. We went to a town called Warri and interviewed families and children and we found children who spoke no other language but Nigerian creole. This had nothing to do with slavery, but peoples coming together, using pidgin English in a widespread community, couples having kids who never learned an African mother tongue, mainly because the mother spoke X and the father Y, and pidgin was the way to communicate...thus giving birth to a creole
I like the following statement:
"This similarity across different types of creole all over the world suggests that people all around the world use the same cognitive skills when they create a new grammatical system."
but the article seems to imply that these languages have no rules, no conjugations, etc. which of course is not true. All languages have rules and creoles are languages!
what follows :
"And this is a fascinating thought.
Our research has revealed that a language can be described as a creole if it meets these conditions:
This seems a little off the wall...I would need some time to think this through.
One thing is that the definition of verb tense here is English oriented, buy vs bought. In African languages, the major distinction (as in say Hebrew) is aspectual, imperfective vs perfective. I have reconstructed this aspectual distinciton for Proto Kru (a branch of Niger Congo) but it appears most tense markers are innovative (I have published a bit on this subject as my Phd was Tense/Aspect and the development of auxiliaries in the Kru language--indeed alongside OT, Heb poetry, etc, it is my life passion....)
Yes, I would say take some of this with a grain of salt but VIVA la discussion!!!!
I know the author of this article, Peter Bakker. His thing is to try to prove that creole languages are "exceptional." That is a debate in creolistics. Many creolists think that there are creole languages (or contact languages more generally), on the one hand, and there are "normal" languages on the other. If this is the case, then the task is to prove how they are in a class of their own, outside "normal" languages, that is, languages with a long pedigree. Some notable linguists such as Salikoko Mufwene of the University of Chicago and Michel DeGraff of MIT disagree, saying you can only identify what we call a creole language by knowing its history. Chaudenson and the French school treat French Creoles as a variety of French and not a different type of language. John McWhorter published an article in Language in 1998 on "Identifying the Creole Prototype: Vindicating a Typological Class," so he is in the exceptional school with Bakker. McWhorter's evidence for creole languages being in a class of their own is more complicated than Bakker's.
I am really surprised to see these four conditions that Bakker proposes that make creole languages a class of their own. I had never seen these before. Baker is a good linguist, but I have politely disagreed with him some in conference presentations, along with others. I don't really have a dog in this fight, though. Bakker does have an agenda, something he is trying to prove, and they have a robust program at the University of Copenhagen working on this.
I never would have thought that it is so rare for languages to have the verb "have" and that this could be one of four things identifying a language as a creole. The one about creole languages not having a word for "not" seems strange. All creole languages that I know of do have a negation particle coming before the verb, e.g. pa in Caribbean French Creoles, ka in West African Portuguese Creole. As for tense, creolists generally recognize creole languages as having preverbal tense particles. Bakker's argument is a little off here, if you ask me, and I've published articles about tense-mood-aspect and time reference in a couple of different creole languages. BUT if you define tense as a form of a verb or a morphological marking on the verb, then they don't, but for a different reason, namely that creole languages generally are isolating, with no morphology. That does NOT mean that time reference is a matter of guesswork. By the way, the marking for tense in creole languages in the form of a preverbal particle denotes anterior tense, not past tense. But there are definite rules.
When Bakker talks about universal grammar, I think he is more thinking of Derek Bickerton than Noam Chomsky. In _Roots of Language,_Bickerton's proposed that a disruption in the transmission of transmission of language meant that chidren had to make up language de novo on the basis of an innate language faculty. According to Bickerton's biogenesis hypothesis, then, creole languages most closely resemble the natural language faculty in the human mind.
I could say more, but I have to catch a flight. Just coming from Nigeria, I was interested to see above that Lynelle Marchese Zogbo was one who identified Nigerian Pidgin as a creole language.
Thanks David. Once again, the post is generating interesting responses. I suppose what confused me somewhat is that the author clearly was acquainted with his material, but there are still a few things one would like to discuss with him, which we have all mentioned (beginning with a precise number for the languages in the world).
Yes, Bob, and one of those things is the goof Lynelle mentioned, about assuming that creoles related to Africa are also related to the slave trade. New World creoles in the Atlantic (not the Pacific, like Hawaiian Creole English) and Caribbean generally have arisen out of the slave trade, but there are creole languages in Africa that have little or no connection with the slave trade, though they may generally be connected to colonialization. (Is that a word? My spell checker doesn't seem to think so.) As for the number of languages in the world, they don't explain how they came up with that figure, and I think we can just ignore that, and I hope everybody else does too. Note, though, that this research project at the University of Copenhagen gets a lot of its information from WALS, and I haven't looked to see what WALS says about the number of languages in the world. I believe not everything WALS comes up with is correct either, but it is often taken to be an authority.