LIGN 101 - Language Families

# Language Families!
### Will Styler - LIGN 101

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### Today's Plan
	
* Languages and Dialects

* What are language families?

* How can languages be related? How can we tell?

- What are some of the major families?

- Are all languages related?

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# Languages vs. Dialects

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### How can we tell if people are speaking two dialects of the same language, or two different languages?

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### This one's kind of tough!

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## "Speakers understand each other!"

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### Mutual Intelligibility

When two people can understand each other when talking.

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### Mutual Intelligibility!

* English speakers understand English speakers

* Russian speakers understand Russian speakers

* Russian speakers *don't* understand English speakers

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### This sounds promising!

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### Dialect Continuum

A geographical continuum of speakers where nearby speakers understand each other, but distant speakers might not.

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<small>[Image Credit](http://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/image/59579538144)</small>

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### Mutual Intelligibility

* Moroccan Arabic speakers don't understand Egyptian Arabic speakers

* (Unless they write the message down)

* Ukrainian speakers understand Russian speakers (and vice versa)

- But Ukrainian speakers understand Belorussian speakers better still

* Swedish, Danish and Norwegian speakers all understand each other

* Brazilian Portuguese speakers understand Spanish better than the other way around

* ("Asymmetrical Mutual Intelligiblity")

* Do speakers of Amish English understand rural New Zealand speakers?

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### OK, so what else?

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## "They use the same writing system!"

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### Shared Writing Systems

* Literate English speakers use the same writing system!

* (... the same one as Tagalog, Romanian, Vietnamese)

* Russian and Mongolian both use Cyrillic

* Moroccan and Yemeni Arabic have a writing system in common, but little else.

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## "Speakers agree they're speaking the same language!"

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<lang>Serbo-Croatian</lang><br><ldata>IE:SW-Slavic - The Balkans</ldata>

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<lang>Serbo-Croatian</lang><br><ldata>IE:SW-Slavic - The Balkans</ldata>

* Also known as "Serbo-Croat" or "BCS"

* Spoken in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro

* Up until the 1990s, there were four dialects, one for Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro

* Yugoslavia broke apart, wars started, people were massacred

* Now they’re four different languages spoken by four different peoples in four different countries

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### So we have...

- Different Dialects which could be languages, but are dialects

- (Moroccan and Egyptian Arabic)

- Languages which could be dialects, but are languages

- (BCS, or Hindi and Urdu)

- Different Languages where speakers understand each other

- (Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish)

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### So what *really* makes a language different from a dialect?
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## *“A language is a dialect with an Army and a Navy”*
<small> Popularized by Max Weinreich </small>

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**Calling something a language or a dialect is a political choice, not a linguistic one**

* If you want to unite yourself with a group, they’re speaking a dialect of your language

* If you want to distance yourself from a group, they’re speaking another language

* *... but we still have to describe the linguistic relationship!*

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# Language Families

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## Language Families are all about patterns

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* <danger>Are some of these languages related?</danger>

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### Mother Language

The original language from which a set of other languages developed

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### Sister Languages

Languages which share a single mother

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* **Sister Languages** - English, German, Dutch, Swedish

* **Mother Language** - Proto-Germanic!

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# How can we figure out these relations?

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## "Will, how are baby languages made?"

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### Well, when speakers love a language very much...

* Speakers of a language inhabit a wide area

* Groups of speakers become geographically or culturally isolated

* The languages changes naturally, but *differently for each group*!

* Let a few hundred years pass, and bam, languages.
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## Case in point: Latin!

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### Step 1: Conquer vast Empire, make everybody speak Latin

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### Step 2: Screw said Empire up

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### Step 3: Daughter Languages!

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### The Romance Languages

The Daughters (and grand-daughters) of Latin

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## What are the signs that languages are related?

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### Geography

Nearby people often speak related languages

<danger>... but not always! </danger>

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<lang>English</lang><br><ldata>IE:Germanic - Everywhere</ldata>

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<lang>French</lang><br><ldata>IE:Italic - Also everywhere</ldata>

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<lang>Breton</lang><br><ldata>IE:Celtic - Brittany</ldata>

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### Actual human genetics!

Researchers have used genetic studies to *support* hypotheses about linguistic and cultural connections

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### Cognates

Words which sound similar across different languages

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---

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### Sound Correspondences

Where one sound in one language systematically corresponds with another sound in another language

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* **/f/ and /v/**

* **/v/ and /b/**

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### Sound correspondences

* We look for common *patterns* of correspondence

* Sounds will change based on how they're produced

* /d, n, l/ will often change around

* (as in the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota languages)

* Systematic sound correspondence with cognates is a slam-dunk case for language relation

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### Shared linguistic features

If a bunch of languages do things in a certain way, they may be related.

* Five languages nearby with a Vocative case?  Prolly related.

* 8 languages with tone, surrounded by languages without tone?  It's a solid bet.

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If you have a few of these things, shared among some languages, you may have a...

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### Language Family

A group of languages which share a common ancestor

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<img class="r-stretch" src="lotwimg/indoeuropean.gif">

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### Language Families in the News

[Image source](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135820)

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## How do we find deeper language ancestry?

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### Finding language ancestry

* 1: Find related languages

* 2: Reconstruct the mother tongue!

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### Language Reconstruction

The process of looking at daughter languages and guessing what structures, sounds, and words the mother language must have had.

* An art, not a science

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### We do this all the time!

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### Reconstructing words

* 1: Find cognates

* 2: Reverse sound changes

* 3: Note borrowings

* 4: When all else fails, go with the most common form in the daughters

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### Reconstructing grammar

* 1: Look at the grammatical patterns and structures present

* 2: Find the ones that are shared among the languages

* 3: Pick a shared pattern or structure

* 4: For those that lack (or have) the pattern or structure, try and explain why

* (Maybe influence from another language, or a conflicting pattern)

* 5: Assume that structures present in a majority of daughters were also present in the mother
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<lang>Proto-Indo-European</lang><br><ldata>Indo-European - ???</ldata>

* *wem-, *h₁reug- - 'to vomit'

* *wāt-, *weh₁- - 'to blow'

* *pneu- - 'to breathe'

* *(s)mei- - 'to laugh'

* *ǵhasto-, *ǵhazdho- - 'stick'

* (According to Watkins 2000)
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### What's the Catch?

<danger>***Reconstruction assumes regularity!***</danger>

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### Reconstruction will fail if...

* Sounds changed unpredictably

* "Ooh, I like /ɠ/, let's use that!"

* Change happened for non-predictable reasons

* "We got rid of that verb form because it sounds too much like "Michael Bay", and did you see what he did to the Transformers franchise?"

* Coincidence

* If more languages got rid of an earlier structure than kept it, we may pretend it's a new thing

* *... and we may never know if it's failed!*

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### ... but it's still our best chance!

* So, when we're looking into relations between languages...

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### Finding language ancestry

* 1: Find related languages

* 2: Reconstruct the mother tongue!

* 3: Then, compare that to other mother languages.

* 4: Then, the mothers' mothers...

* 5: If they have words, features, or structures in common, you've got a family!

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### Which of the following information **does not** help us to find language relations?

A) Geography

B) Sound correspondences

C) Shared Writing Systems

D) Cognate words

E) DNA and Genetic Testing

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### Which of the following information **does not** help us to find language relations?

A) Geography

B) Sound correspondences

<correct>C) Shared Writing Systems</correct>

D) Cognate words

E) DNA and Genetic Testing

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# What are some of the major language families?

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## Indo-European (~3.2 Billion Speakers)

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## Indo-European (~3.2 Billion Speakers)

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## Sino-Tibetan (~1.4 Billion Speakers)

- Includes Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan

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## Niger-Congo Languages (~519 Million Speakers)

- Includes Swahili, Igbo, Fula, Zulu, and Zarma

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## Afroasiatic Languages (~500 Million Speakers)

- Includes Arabic, Hausa, Oromo, Amharic, Somali, Hebrew

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## Austronesian Languages (~386 Million Speakers)

- Includes Malay, Tagalog, Malagasy, Cham, Hawaiian, Maori

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### That's just the top five

... there are many, MANY more language families

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## Language Families of Indigenous America

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## Language Families of Amazonas

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## Language Families of the Caucasus

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Wow... that's a lot of language families!

- ### Do all languages have relatives?

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# Do all languages have relatives?

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### Yes, but we don't always know what they are!

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## Linguistic Isolates

Languages where we have found no contemporary relatives or ancestors

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### Basque

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### Other well-known(ish) isolates

* Ainu (spoken in Japan)

* Karok (spoken in California)

* Korean (spoken in Korea)

* Natchez (spoken in MS/LA, now OK)

* Zuni (spoken in New Mexico)

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# ... but aren't all languages related?

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### "Proto Human"/"Proto World"

The postulated human mother-tongue

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### Proto-World is mostly the domain of crackpots

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### Proto-World

- This requires reconstructing based on reconstruction

- No written records have been found to exist

- lol.

- This makes the assumption that humans only developed language once!

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### Wrapping Up

* 'Language' vs. 'Dialect' is political, not linguistic

* Dialects of a 'mother language' which grow apart become 'daughter languages'

* This begets 'language families'

* We find these relations by looking for cognates, sound correspondences, shared features, and by doing reconstruction

* We can't always find relatives for languages.

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<huge>Thank you!</huge>