Language Diversity and Ethnologue

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Del curso dictado por Universiteit Leiden

Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics

1075 calificaciones

Universiteit Leiden

Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics

1075 calificaciones

Everywhere, every day, everybody uses language. There is no human society, no matter how small or how isolated, which does not employ a language that is rich and diverse. This course introduces you to linguistics, featuring interviews with well-known linguists and with speakers of many different languages. Join us to explore the miracles of human language! The Miracles of Human Language introduces you to the many-faceted study of languages, which has amazed humans since the beginning of history. Together with speakers of many other languages around the world, as well as with famous linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Adele Goldberg, you will learn to understand and analyse how your native tongue is at the same time similar and different from many other languages. You will learn the basic concepts of linguistics, get to know some of the key features of big and small languages and get insight into what linguists do. This course gives an introduction into the study of languages, the field of linguistics. With the support of the basic linguistic terminology that is offered in the course, you will soon be able to comment both on variety between languages, as well as on a single language’s internal structure. Anyone who wishes to understand how languages work, and how they can give us insight into the human mind is very welcome to join. The course is useful if you want to get a fairly quick introduction into linguistics, for instance because you are considering studying it further, or because you are interested in a neighbouring discipline such as psychology, computer science or anthropology. Furthermore, the course will help you develop analytical skills. If you are curious to understand how language works and how it gives insight into the human mind, this course is definitely for you!

De la lección

Introduction to Linguistics

In this first week, we will try to determine what makes language human: why do (almost) all human beings have a language, and what makes human language different from animal communication systems? We will furthermore discuss the many different places where linguists work, and the many different methodologies that they use for conducting their research. You will moreover get to know all the other participants in this MOOC: my students Inge and Marten, as well as the speakers of six different languages. Finally, don't forget to watch our first expert interview: Marten and Inge have talked with Dr. Victoria Nyst of Leiden University, who has enlightened us in the fascinating world of sign languages! For the assignments with the support of Ethnologue, please make sure to study the instructions listed in 'required and optional readings' of this module.

Human Language and Animal Communication Systems6:30

Human Language Versus Other 'Languages'9:30

Discussion with Marten and Inge: Language Diversity9:41

Language Diversity and Ethnologue8:24

Discussion with Marten and Inge: What do Linguists do?13:03

Interview with Dr. Victoria Nyst10:16

Conoce a los instructores

Marc van Oostendorp
Prof. Dr
Meertens instituut

Hi, after my discussion with Inge and Marten.

In this video, I want to look a little bit more into language variation.

How many languages are there in the world?

How do we count them?

Well, how many languages are there in the world?

It's actually difficult to decide,

maybe it's impossible to decide on real scientific criteria.

We have to guess.

The reason is that there's many areas in the world where we simply don't

know which languages are spoken there.

And in other areas, it's sometimes difficult to decide whether something is,

for instance, a dialect rather than a language.

There are no objective criteria for making this decision, so we guess.

The most heard estimate is something between 6 and

7,000 languages in the world.

That's also the number which is given by probably the most authoritative list

of languages.

Which is an online encyclopedia of languages called Ethnologue.

We're going to use that encyclopedia quite a lot in this course.

Ethnologue is free and you can use it to find information about countries,

about languages, about language families etc.

This is an example of a webpage about a language from the Amazon called Itonama.

What you can see is that Ethnologue tells you where the language is spoken and

what it's status is.

Itonma used to be spoken in some places in Bolivia, but

from the status we can see that the language is actually dying out.

Ethnologue also gives us information about countries.

Look at this page about Brazil for instance.

You have to be very careful in interpreting

the results about what Ethnologue actually say.

Also, the editors of Ethnologue sometimes make arbitrary decisions about what

to call a language or not.

Take a look.

As you see in Ethnologue, if you study it a little bit more.

You will find that many languages in Ethnologue are very small.

Many have fewer than say 1,000 speakers.

Many of those languages are dying out,

they will no longer be spoken in a century from now.

As a matter of fact, some people estimate that by the end of this century.

There will be only about 300 languages left in the whole world.

This obviously makes it very important to document these smaller languages and

to do so now.

So other languages are very big, here's the top 10.

With Chinese as number one with the biggest population of speakers, and

followed by Spanish and English.

But let's take a closer look at Chinese, that's not just one language.

There's actually many different varieties.

And those varieties in some other parts of the world,

might be called separate languages.

In this MOOC, you will discover that those 6,000 or

7,000 languages can differ from each other in many different ways.

For instance, there are languages which seem to have around 20 different vowel

sounds where as others may have only two or three.

Or it is even be claimed that there are languages which have only one vowel sound.

Some languages seem to put a lot of information in one long big word.

Turkish is an example of such a language.

Others seem to have very short words and therefore,

they have sentences with many words.

Vietnamese is an example of such a language.

In Chinese, we have different words for the older brother of your father and

the younger brother of your father.

In English, you would always use the same word for those two different people.

On the other hand,

if you speak English you always have to distinguish between the sentences.

He is nice, masculine, and she is nice, feminine.

Which Chinese speakers do not have to do.

In the next modules,

we're going to look in much more detail into these kinds of differences.

But in spite of those differences, languages can also be very similar.

One factor for these similarities is that they are organized in families.

In languages which are historically related to each other.

For instance, French and Italian are so

called sister languages because they have the same parent language.

Namely Latin.

You can also see this now,

nowadays because many of their words are very similar.

The French word un, of course in Italian uno.

The French word main corresponds to Italian mano.

The French word homme corresponds to uomo.

German and English are also related to each other.

And again, we can see this.

The German word ein is the English word one.

The German word Hand is the English word hand.

Languages are just structure based on these kind of relationships.

And we can go even further.

German and

English we call Germanic languages because they are related to each other.

French and Italian we call Romance languages.

But in turn, Romance and Germanic are part of the same language family.

Mainly Indo-European, so they are related at a slightly different level.

Most of the languages in Europe belong to this family,

as do many languages spoken in Asia.

There's a lot of these families around the world.

Other examples are the Dravidian languages spoken in South Asia of which Tamil is

an example.

Or Niger-Congo,

spoken in sub Sahara Africa of which Swahili is a famous example.

In some regions, there's still much confusion about how

languages are exactly related to each other.

For instance in South America, there's still a lot of debate about this.

Also, there are languages that do not seem to be related to

any other language in the world.

A very known example of this, in Europe is Basque.

It's spoken in Europe, in Spain and France,.

But it's not clearly related to any other language spoken in this continent.

There's also other reasons why languages can be similar.

For instance, they can be in contact with each other.

They can be spoken in the same area and people may borrow words from each other.

Internet is an English word that we now find in many languages

because many languages are in contact with English.

And finally, all human languages are built according to a similar scheme

because they're all spoken by humans.

We all have similar bodies.

We have similar brains.

And therefore, also our languages are similar.

In summary, we now know there are about 6,000 languages.

But we also know that it's actually very hard to count them precisely.

I've shown you around on Ethnologue a little bit, which is a very useful tool.

I would like to invite you to use it, to explore it a little bit on your own.

To find out things about your own language, your own country, or

other languages and other countries.

We've also looked about what are the factors which make languages be similar or

related to each other.

And I've given you a few teasers about how languages can be different, and the same.

And we're going to talk a lot more about that in the next modules.

So now you know a little bit about languages as a research topic.

But in the next video, I'm going to explore a very intriguing question with

the students Inge and Marten.

The question, what do linguists really do?

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