CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
Language is one of the cornerstones of national identity, cultural unity, and community cohesion. It is the most important cultural glue—an aspect that binds a culture together—because without language, there would he no culture. People have very strong feelings about their language and identify with it (people may be persuaded to change their religion, but not their language). When a people’s language is threatened, the response is often passionate and protective.
Thousands of languages are spoken in the world today (linguists estimate between 5000 and 6000)and they serve as both unifiers and dividers of humanity. Ironically, all languages may have a common origin. Consider the following points carefully as you read this chapter.
Standard Language
Human languages even those spoken in preliterate societies—peoples who speak their languages but do not write it—are fundamentally different from those of nonhuman primates. Human languages are not static but change constantly because a vital culture requires a flexible language and the potential vocabulary of any language is infinite.
Mature and complex cultures—technologically advanced societies—attempt to maintain a standard language sustained by national institutions and official state examinations. In The modern world, where innovations diffuse rapidly, such standards are difficult to uphold one problem that arises is: who decides what the standard language will be? Not surprisingly, the answer has to do with influence and power—circumstances that often produce problems in a world where cultural identity and national self-interest are increasingly significant.
Classification and Distribution of Languages
The problem of language classification relates to the definition of language. At issue is what is a language(according to The dictionary: ”human communication by voice) and what is a dialect (“language of a particular area or class”)? The issue is a complex one and it is clear that the distinction is not based on an objective measure of mutual intelligibility. Instead, it must be recognized that what we consider a language is a function of society’s view of what constitutes a cultural community—a matter mat in mm is influenced by historical development in the political arena.
Language classification uses terms that are also employed in biology, and for the same reasons: some languages are related and some are not. Language families are Thought to have a shared, but fairly distant, origin in a language subfamily, the commonality is more definite. Subfamilies are divided into language groups, which consist of sets of individual languages.
Figure 8-2 shows the distribution of 20 major language families. On this map, only the Indo-European language family is broken down into subfamilies (greater detail is shown in Figure 8-3). Spatially, the Indo-European languages are the most widely dispersed. More people speak languages belonging to the Indo-European language family than those in any other family. There are good reasons that this pattern. When the European migration of emigrants and colonists spread over tile world in the last 500 years, one of the cultural components that spread with them was their language. Add to this the fact that indigenous populations were virtually wiped out in The Americas and Australia (and their languages with them) and the European desire to spread the Christian faith, usually in the language of the European culture invading the area, and the patterns on the map become easier to understand.
Major World Languages
Chinese is spoken by more people than any other language (Table 8-1), with English ranking second. The numbers in Table 8-1, however, should be viewed as approximations only. English is the primary language of 350 million people in 6 major countries and numerous smaller countries with millions of inhabitants; it is also used as a second language of hundreds of millions in India , Africa , and elsewhere. English has also become the principal language of cross-culture communications, economics, and science. In a world where rapid communication and travel is becoming more the norm than the exception, this has some benefits, since there is no such thing as a “global language,” at least not officially. Consider, for example, the possible problems on an international airline trip if the cockpit crew spoke one language and the airport control tower personnel another. Fortunately, there is supposed to be an English-speaking per-son in each location. English is also spreading with the World Wide Web, at least to countries where there is access.
The present distribution of languages, as revealed on maps, is useful in understanding cultural development and change. Figure 8-4, for example, indicates the four Dravidian languages are all spoken in a compact region in the south of the Indian Peninsula . The map thus suggests that these languages (which are older) and the cultures they represent were ‘pushed” southward by the advancing Indo-European speakers. Similar interesting patterns can be observed in Figure 8-3 by looking at the spatial pattern of the Germanic and Romance language subfamilies.
