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Gungbe

A bay language of the Kwe family of Niger-Congo

Spoken in the southern part of Benin, Badagry, Nigeria and also Lagos in Nigeria.

About one million people who speak this language in this area

Tone language

The Bakweri (or Kwe) - Bantu ethnic group of the Republic of Cameroon

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Turkish
Official language of Turkey and northern Cyprus
Around 80 million native speakers

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Basque

Spoken in the Western Pyrenees

Under the administration of France and Spain

Around 800,000 speakers - About 500,000 are native speakers

Most Basque speakers are bilingual, with French or Spanish

In Spain, Basque is used in education at all levels

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Tarifit Berber

Berber language spoken in Northeastern Morocco

Approximately 1.5 to 2 million speakers

Spoken in many European countries, including the Netherlands

Is the 2nd immigrant language spoken in the Netherlands after Turkish

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Language Informants: Roberta D'Alessandro 

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Language Informants: Roberta D'Alessandro 

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Abruzzese

Southern Italian language.

Not a dialect

About 1 million native speakers

Mostly spoken by bilinguals - ppl who speak Abruzzese & Italian

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How Many Languages are there in the World? (Linguistic Society of America Brochure Series, 2010) -

Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations (such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, now known as SIL International) with an interest in translating the Christian Bible.

As of 2009, at least a portion of the bible had been translated into 2,508 different languages, still a long way short of full coverage.

The most extensive catalogue of the world’s languages,  Ethnologue (published by SIL International), whose detailed classified list as of 2009 included 6,909 distinct languages.

Most languages belong to families. A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another.

The best-known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.  There are about 200 Indo-European languages

Out of Ethnologue’s 6,909 languages, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia.

Papua-New Guinea estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million.

Ethnologue shows at least ten distinct Romance languages spoken in France, including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, and several others in addition to “French.”

In pre-contact times, over 300 languages were spoken in North America.  About half have died out completely which leaves about 165 of North America’s indigenous languages spoken at least to some extent today.

Around a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than a thousand remaining speakers. Linguists estimate the extinction of 3,000 of the 6,909 languages listed by Ethnologue within the next century.

When a language dies, a world dies with it, in the sense that a community’s connection with its past, its traditions and its base of specific knowledge are all typically lost as the vehicle linking people to that knowledge is abandoned

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The Waggle Dance of the Honeybees (Georgia Tech College of Computing, 2011) - Gravity plus the bees solar compass and internal clock provides another communal reference point, the Sun. By pairing these two global constants the bees form a simple language.

Within the hive, the direction up away from gravity substitutes for the location of the Sun. Then the angle that the bee dances compared to this up direction is the same angle a bee should fly away from the Sun in order to find the target flower.
Ex. Bee dances at a 90-degree angle towards the left. The other bees should fly 90 degrees from the left of the sun.

Uses its internal clock to adjust for the movement of the Sun in the sky. Allows fellow workers to always know the correct direction to travel in order to find food.

Orientation of dance = angle from the Sun

Central waggle of dance = distance/seconds

One second for every kilometre

Other info. such as quality or abundance of food could be encoded in other parameters of the dance or in pheromones.

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When signing an object there are mainly two different options, outlining and embodying.

If we look at West African sign languages it seems

that the embodiment strategy more popular, and the outline strategy is used much less as compared to sign languages of European origin.

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Ghanian sign language - Adamorobe

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Sign linguists study the linguistic structure of sign languages as used by deaf communities all around the world.

Being used by deaf people, sign languages don't majorly depend on sound as distinctive units, but we do see the same kind of systematic use of abstract building blocks.
Whereas spoken languages use sounds, sign languages use what we call parameters

Handshape - used to articulate the sign

Movement - way the hand moves to articulate the sign

Location - where the hand is located (in space, on the body, on the head)

Orientation - do the fingers point upward, or to the front. What about the palm?

Non-manual features - facial expressions, particular mouth movements, or head-tilting

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The famous American social linguist, William Labov, once said linguists work in five different fields, in five different areas in the world. They work in the library, they work in the bush, they work in the closet, they work in the laboratory, and they work on the street.

They do various tasks and work all over the world in many different places.

Linguists mainly work in 5 different fields

Library - They work with Ethnologue and history books. Study the history of individual languages or the way in which languages are related in language families. They can also study the way in which language is used (Philologists).

Bush - Travel and go to different countries to study languages that we essentially know nothing about. These languages are spoken by small groups of people in areas where people are hard to reach. Many of these languages disappear over time.

Closet - Linguists who work in the closet do a lot of thinking. They mainly think and write about languages. They think about the many puzzles of human language and also write grammar for individual languages(Theoretical Linguists).

Laboratory - Use different machines to study the phonetics of languages These people can be called Phoneticians. Phoneticians study speech sounds, so we can record those speech sounds, and then typically put them in the computer and study them in detail. Another group is Psycholinguists. They study linguistics in combination with psychology or from a psychological point of view.

Street - They study the way language is used in everyday life and the small differences in speech.

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They could be in contact with each other

Spoken in the same area

People may borrow words from each other

All human languages are built according to a similar scheme because they're spoken by humans

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Germanic:

German & English

Romance:

French & Latin

All part of the Indo-European language family. Most of the languages in Europe belong to this family, as do many languages spoken in Asia.

Dravidian languages spoken in South Asia

Tamil

Niger-Congo, spoken in sub-Sahara Africa

Swahili

In some regions, there's still much confusion about how languages are exactly related to each other.

There are also languages that do not seem to be related to any other language in the world.
Basque which is spoken in Europe, Spain, and France is a good example of this.

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There is an estimate of 6,000-7,000 languages in the world - Hard to count precisely

Fun fact: There are 97 languages dying in Brazil

Some people estimate that by the end of this century. There will be only about 300 languages left in the whole world.

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All humans have language, then how come we don't all speak the same language?

Language serves as a communication system

Differences

Language has complications

Languages change that's why there are so many variations

Do all languages have the same origin?

Humans came from East Africa and then migrated

Languages have been written for maybe 5,000 years. It's almost impossible to find traces of spoken languages.

It's possible that homosapiens all spoke one language, but it's mere speculation and impossible to prove.

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They're very few, and they're always people who are suffering from some very physical, psychological or social impediments, or even some combination thereof.

Wolf children - Children who grew up without their parents, or where their parents didn't want to speak to them for some strange reason. One very famous example of this for linguists is the example of Genie. Later on, she was not able to figure out the system of combining all these words into infinitely many sentences.

People might also sometimes lose their language. They then suffer from a medical condition called aphasia. They will lose part of their language capacity because part of their brain no longer functions.

They may lose their ability to pronounce, their ability to understand language, or their ability to speak coherently, their ability to make grammatical sentences.

So they can communicate a message, but their sentences will always be very strange.

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Discontinuity theories say that human language is really something different.

Something must have happened in our development to make

human language possible.

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Continuity based theories say that language is based on animal communication.

It's just a somewhat more complicated form of them.

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What are your goals for this course? What do you want to learn? How do you want to learn it?

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What are your goals for this course? What do you want to learn? How do you want to learn it?

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My goal is to successfully complete this course. By completing the course, I will successfully expand my knowledge on the building blocks of language and linguistics.