LINGUISTICS

Language and Linguists

Part -II
NOVEMBER 6, 2016
ADABPAL
Faculty of Languages and Literature, Dept. English, Kandahar University
 Table of Contents
1. An introduction to Language
2. Definition of Language
3. Nature of Language
4. Characteristics of Language
5. Importance of Language
6. The History of Language
7. Language Variants
1. Dialects
2. Jargon
3. Pidgins
4. Creoles
5. Register
6. Style
8. Dialect
9. Varieties of Dialects
1. Geographic Dialects
2. Social Dialects
10. Dialectal change and diffusion
11. Standard languages
12. Nonverbal language
13. Language acquisition
14. Neologisms
15. Loanwords
16. Language and Culture
17. Transmission of language and culture
18. Second-language learning
19. Nationalistic influences on language
20. Language learning
21. Monolingualism
22. Bilingualism
23. Multilingualism
24. Language Typology
25. Indo-European languages
26. Languages of the family
1. Anatolian
2. Indo-Iranian
3. Greek
4. Italic
5. Germanic
6. Armenian
7. Tocharian
8. Celtic
9. Balto-Slavic
10. Albanian
27. Characteristic developments of Indo-European languages
1. Changes in phonology
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 2. Changes in morphology
3. Vocabulary changes
28. Non-Indo-European influence on the family
29. The History of English
30. Old English
31. Middle English
32. Early Modern English
33. Later Modern English
34. Varieties of English language

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Language
Introduction

Definitions of Language
Many definitions of language have been proposed. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language
scholar, stated: Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words.
Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts. The
American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following definition: A language
is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates. Any succinct
definition of language makes a number of presuppositions and begs a number of questions. The first, for
example, puts excessive weight on thought, and the second uses arbitrary in a specialized, though
legitimate, way.

Nature of Language
1. Language is learnt: Learning of language is not an automatic process. Of course, it is a behaviour
but it is not type of behaviour like walking and crawling that comes to child in natural way. Language by
imitation and practice. Language is not possible without effort.
2. Language is related to the culture of society: Every language is related to culture of society to
which it belongs. The culture of the people naturally influences the language. Every language is the
product of society. We cannot separate language from the culture in which that language exists. It has
meaning only in relation to that society and culture.
3. Language is species specific: Language is species specific. Only human beings have got the gift of
language. Of course, the other species do communicate but only human beings can make use of
language.
4. Language is species uniformed: Language is species uniformed. All human children are capable of
acquiring any language natively if they are provided the right kind of environment.
5. Language is a system: Each language is a unique system. The system of language consists of sounds,
structures and vocabulary. A person who wants to learn a new language will have to learn new sounds,
new structures and new vocabulary. The sound system of language differs from language to language
depending upon the culture to which a language belongs. Each language has its own system of
vocabulary. Thus each language is systematic.
6. Language is a system of systems: Each language is a system of systems. There are phonological and
grammatical systems in all languages. There are several sub systems with in a language. The phonology
of a language forms its own system as the various sounds function in a systematic way.
7. Language is a system of symbols: Each language works through symbols. Different words used in a
language are the symbols. They stand for certain things. The language will function well if its symbols are
known both to the speaker and the person for whom they are being used.
8. Symbols of language are vocal: Different symbols are used in a single language. These symbols are
vocal. A language system does not exist in a vacuum. It is primary used in speech. Only speech provides
all essential signals of a language. There are other kinds of symbols which cannot be called vocal
symbols. For example, gestures and signal flags are visual symbols and ringing of the bells and beating of
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a drum are auditory symbols. They do not form any language. In language the sounds are produced
through vocal organs. Reading and writing are no doubt important. But speech is the basic form of
language. A language without speech is unthinkable.
9. Language is a skill subject: Learning of a language is a skill subject. It is skill like swimming and
cycling. We cannot learn swimming or cycling just by studying rules. We can learn it by practice. In the
same way, we can learn a language y constant practice of that language. So a lot of repetition for major
linguistic skills like listening, speaking, reading and writing is required.
10. Language is for communication: Language is the best means of communication and self-
expressions. Human beings express their ideas, thoughts, feelings and emotions through language. In
this way language is a means to connect past present and future.
11. Governed by a particular set of rules: Each language is governed by a particular set or rules. For
example English is S.V.O. language. In forming sentence, we put subject, then verb and after verb we put
object.
For example:
He killed a snake.
Subject Verb Object
12. Symbols of language are Arbitrary: Here by arbitrary symbols we meant that there is no visual
relationship between the language item and the object for which it stands. A man is called man
traditionally. There is no visual similarity between the symbol man and the actual man. We have not
named it so on the basis of some logic or scientific principles. In English we say man, in Hindi we say
manauYya. In fact, we call a man man because people have agreed to use it in that sense.
13. Language is unique: Each language is unique because it has its own style of functioning. The
sounds, vocabulary and structures of every language have their own specialty.

Characteristics of Language
Language is a means of communication, it is arbitrary, it is a system of systems. We know that Speech is
primary while writing is secondary.
Language is human so it differs from animal communication in several ways. Language can have scores
of characteristics but the following are the most important ones: language is arbitrary, productive,
creative, systematic, vocalic, social, non-instinctive and conventional. These characteristics of language
set human language apart from animal communication. Some of these features may be part of animal
communication; yet they do not form part of it in total.
1. Language is dynamic.
2. Language has levels.
3. Language is creative and unique.
4. Language is a means of communication.
5. Language identifies culture.

The Importance of Language

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Language is obviously a vital tool. Not only is it a means of communicating thoughts and ideas, but it
forges friendships, cultural ties, and economic relationships.
Throughout history, many have reflected on the importance of language. For instance, the scholar
Benjamin Whorf has noted that language shapes thoughts and emotions, determining ones perception
of reality.
John Stuart Mill said that "Language is the light of the mind."
For the linguist Edward Sapir, language is not only a vehicle for the expression of thoughts, perceptions,
sentiments, and values characteristic of a community; it also represents a fundamental expression of
social identity. Sapir said: "the mere fact of a common speech serves as a peculiar potent symbol of the
social solidarity of those who speak the language." In short, language retention helps maintain feelings of
cultural kinship.
Since the adoption of official bilingualism, we have been better able to provide to the younger
generations the tools and knowledge for them to excel not only here at home, but beyond our national
borders. This has allowed them to reach for the dreams and succeed in areas they may not have
otherwise. For example, three of my four children have studied, or are studying, Spanish, which comes
more easily after learning French.
Language, of course, is knowledge, and in our world today knowledge is one of the key factors in
competitiveness. Brains and knowledge are what create the prosperity and growth we tend to take for
granted. In an advanced industrial society in an increasingly interdependent world, the knowledge of
other languages becomes indispensable. Just think of how the advent of the Internet has changed our
lives. For the last few years, millions of people across the world, who share common interests, are able
to communicate with each other and exchange ideas. Not only are they able to do this due to the various
technological advances, but also because they share a common language.
There is, of course, no denying that the knowledge of the English language is one of the most important
tools available to our children. It is one of the international languages, a tool of communication between
countries, cultural groups, various companies and organizations, communities and friends.
Although much is said about the importance of the English language, one cannot overlook the important
economic and diplomatic relationships that our country has forged with other French-speaking
countries.

Human Language and Communication Have The Following Properties:

1. Displacement: Capacity to produce messages that can refer to past and future time, and to other
locations.
2. Arbitrariness: There is no one-to-one correspondence between a linguistic form and its meaning.
Meaning is always arbitrary and maintained by convention.
3. Productivity: The ability to be creative and to produce utterances not heard before.

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4. Cultural transmission: Language does not develop automatically if there is no culture to transmit it to
the young members.
5. Discreteness: The sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct and discrete.
6. Duality: Distinct sounds and distinct meanings. It is one of the most economical features of human
language, since with a limited set of distinct sounds we can produce a very large number of sound
combinations.

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The History of Language
Language Beginnings
One view: Sign language provided a stepping stone. The Early humans used sign language instinctively.
Then the gesture became conventionalized and were sometimes accompanied by sounds. Consequently
they opted for action language. Finally in the long run Sounds became more important than the
gestures. Modern supporters of the gesture theory emphasize points
a) Language is not inevitably spoken.
b) Gestures are universal and obvious.
c) Signs are easier to acquire than full languages.
d) Language and gesture may be linked in the brain.
Gesture Language:
Gestures are neither obvious nor universal. Example Some English students who have hires a rowing
boat were arrested off the coast of Greece as they unknowingly approached a military installation:
Locals had tried to warn them but the students have interpreted the local go away gesture as a come
hither one.
Sign language vs. Speech:
It is claimed by some researcher that signs can be picked up more easily than speech. Some mentally
handicapped children have also found signs easier to grasp than ordinary language. Brain structure is
another factor used by supporters of sign language origin for language The left hemisphere of the human
brain is specialized both for right handedness and for language, suggesting a neurological connection,
especially as hand movements tend to occur during speech.
Humans have never automatically taken the easiest way forward, especially if it is inefficient: and since
the sign cannot be seen in the dark, and they occupy the hands, some researcher claims that signs do not
come naturally to humans.

Language variants
The word language contains a multiplicity of different designations. Two senses have already been
distinguished: language as a universal species-specific capability of the human race and languages as the
various manifestations of that capability, as with English, French, Latin, Swahili, Malay, and so on. There
is, of course, no observable universal language over and above the various languages that have been or are
spoken or written, but one may choose to concentrate on the general and even the universal features,
characteristics, and components of different languages and on the ways in which the same sets of
descriptive procedures and explanatory theories may be applied to different languages. In so doing one
may refer to language (in general) as one's object of study. This is what is done by linguists, or linguistic
scientists, persons devoting themselves to the scientific study of languages (as opposed to the popular
sense of linguists as polyglots, persons having a command of several different languages).

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1. Dialects
It has already been pointed out that no two persons speak exactly alike, and, within the area of all but the
smallest speech communities (groups of people speaking the same language), there are subdivisions of
recognizably different types of language, called dialects, that do not, however, render intercommunication
impossible or markedly difficult. Because intercomprehensibility lies along a scale, the degree required for
two or more forms of speech to qualify as dialects of a single language, instead of being regarded as
separate languages, is not easy to quantify or to lay down in advance, and the actual cutoff point must in
the last resort be arbitrary. In practice, however, the terms dialect and language can be used with
reasonable agreement. One speaks of different dialects of English (Southern British English, Northern
British English, Scottish English, Midwest American English, New England American English, Australian
English, and so on, with, of course, many more delicately distinguished subdialects within these very
general categories), but no one would speak of Welsh and English or of Irish and English as dialects of a
single language, although they are spoken within the same areas and often by people living in the same
villages as each other.

2. Jargon

Sometimes, as in the case of criminal argots, part of the function of special languages is deliberately to
mislead and obstruct the rest of society and the authorities in particular; they may even become wholly
impenetrable to outsiders. But this is not the sole or main purpose of most specialized varieties of
language. Professions whose members value their standing in society and are eager to render their services
to the public foster their own vocabulary and usage, partly to enhance the dignity of their profession and
the skills they represent but partly also to increase their efficiency. An example of this is the language of
the law and of lawyers.

The cultivation and maintenance of specialized types of language by certain professions should not be
regarded as trivially or superficially motivated. In general usage, languages are necessarily imprecise, or
they would lack the flexibility and infinite extensibility demanded of them. But for certain purposes in
restricted situations, much greater precision is required, and part of the function of the particular style and
vocabulary of legal language is the avoidance, so far as may be possible, of all ambiguity and the explicit
statement of all necessary distinctions. This is why legal texts, when read out of their context, seem so
absurdly pedantic and are an easy target for ridicule. Similar provision for detail and clarity characterizes
the specialist jargons of medicine and of the sciences in general and also of philosophy. Indeed, one might
regard the formulas of modern symbolic logic as the result of a consciously developed and specialized
written language for making precise the relations of implication and inference between statements that,
when couched in everyday language, are inexact and open to misinterpretation. Some have gone as far as
to say that traditional metaphysics is no more than the result of misunderstanding everyday discourse and
that the main purpose of philosophy is to resolve the puzzles that arise from such misunderstandings.

The use of specialized types of language in fostering unity is also evidenced in the stereotyped forms of
vocabulary employed in the playing of certain games. Tennis scores use the sequence love, 15, 30, 40, and
game; cricketers verbally appeal to the umpire when a batsman may be out by calling How's that? and
the ways of being out are designated by stereotypes, run out, leg before wicket, stumped, and so
forth. The esoteric language of horse racing and its associated wagering of money is well known, though
not readily understood by outsiders.

The ancient but persistent recognition of the power of language is apparent in the respect for correctness in
the use of language in any sphere of life having supernatural connections. Those credited with such
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connections employ special formulas and rigidly prescribed modes of diction; examples of the language of
magic and of magicians are widespread, including the usages of shamans and witch doctors and the ritual
abracadabra of the mock magic displayed by conjurors at children's parties.

The efficacy of religious worship and of prayers is frequently associated with the strict maintenance of
correct forms of language, taught by priests to their successors, lest the ritual become invalid. In ancient
India the preservation in all its supposed purity of the language used in the performance of certain
religious rituals (Sanskrit) gave rise to one of the world's most important schools of linguistics and
phonetics. In the Christian churches one can observe the value placed by Church of England and
Episcopalian churchmen on the formal English of the Authorized Version of the Bible and of The Book of
Common Prayer, despite attempts at replacing these ritual forms of language by forms taken from modern
spoken vernaculars.

3. Pidgins

Some specialized languages were developed to keep the outsider at bay. In other circumstances, languages
have been deliberately created to facilitate communication with outsiders. This happens when people
speaking two different languages have to work together, usually in some form of trade relation or
administrative routine. In such situations the so-called pidgins arise, more or less purposely made up of
vocabulary items from each language, with mutual abandonment of grammatical complexities that would
cause confusion to either party. Pidgins have been particularly associated with areas settled by European
traders; examples have been Chinook Jargon, a lingua franca based on an American Indian language and
English that was formerly used in Washington and Oregon, and Beach-la-mar, an English-based pidgin of
parts of the South Seas. Some pidgins have come to be extensively used, such as Tok Pisin in Papua New
Guinea and the pidgins of the West African coast.

Sometimes, as the result of relatively permanent settlement and the intermixture of two speech
communities, a pidgin becomes the first language, or mother tongue, of later generations, ultimately
displacing both the original languages. First languages arising in this way from artificially created pidgins
are called creoles. Notable among creoles is the language of Haiti, Haitian Creole, built up from the
French of the settlers and the African language of the former slaves; it shows lexical and grammatical
features of both sources.

4. Creoles

Creoles differ from pidgins in that, as first languages, they are subject to the natural processes of change
like any other language and, despite the deliberately simplified form of the original pidgin, in the course of
generations creoles develop their own complexities. The reason is plain to see. The restricted uses to
which pidgins were first put and for which they were devised did not require any great flexibility. Once
such a language becomes the first or only language of many people, it must perforce acquire the resources
(i.e., the complexity) to respond adequately to all the requirements of a natural language. The study of the
processes whereby a pidgin becomes a creole and of the relationship between creoles and a country's
standard language is carried on within sociolinguistics. The investigation can be controversial, as
historical records may be missing and major issues of cultural and ethnic identity are involved.

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5. Register

In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social
setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting contrary to an informal setting, an English speaker
may be more likely to use features of prescribed grammarsuch as pronouncing words ending in -ing
with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g. "walking", not "walkin'"), choosing more formal words
(e.g. father vs. dad, child vs. kid, etc.), and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as
ain't.
As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete
set of obviously distinct varieties numerous registers could be identified, with no clear boundaries
between them. Discourse categorisation is a complex problem, and even in the general definition of
"register" given above (language variation defined by use not user), there are cases where other kinds of
language variation, such as regional or age dialect, overlap. Consequent to this complexity, scholarly
consensus has not been reached for the definitions of terms including "register", "field" or "tenor";
different scholars' definitions of these terms are often in direct contradiction of each other. Additional
terms including diatype, genre, text types, style, acrolect, mesolect and basilect, among many others, may
be used to cover the same or similar ground. Some prefer to restrict the domain of the term "register" to a
specific vocabulary (Wardhaugh, 1986) (which one might commonly call jargon), while others[who?]
argue against the use of the term altogether. These various approaches with their own "register", or set of
terms and meanings, fall under disciplines including sociolinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics or systemic
functional grammar.

Types of Register:
In one prominent model, Martin Joos (1961) describes five styles in spoken English:
1. Frozen: Also referred to as static register. Printed unchanging language, such as Biblical quotations,
often contains archaisms. Examples are the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States of America and
other "static" vocalizations. The wording is exactly the same every time it is spoken.
2. Formal: One-way participation; no interruption; technical vocabulary or exact definitions are
important; includes presentations or introductions between strangers.
3. Consultative: Two-way participation; background information is provided prior knowledge is not
assumed. "Back-channel behavior" such as "uh huh", "I see", etc. is common. Interruptions are allowed.
Examples include teacher/student, doctor/patient, expert/apprentice, etc.
4. Casual: In-group friends and acquaintances; no background information provided; ellipsis and slang
common; interruptions common. This is common among friends in a social setting.
5. Intimate: Non-public; intonation more important than wording or grammar; private vocabulary. Also
includes non-verbal messages. This is most common among family members and close friends.

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Dialect
Introduction

A variety of a language that signals where a person comes from. The notion is usually interpreted
geographically (regional dialect), but it also has some application in relation to a person's social
background (class dialect) or occupation (occupational dialect). The word dialect comes from the Ancient
Greek dialektos discourse, language, dialect, which is derived from dialegesthai to discourse, talk. A
dialect is chiefly distinguished from other dialects of the same language by features of linguistic
structurei.e., grammar (specifically morphology and syntax) and vocabulary. In morphology (word
formation), various dialects in the Atlantic states have clim, clum, clome, or cloome instead of climbed,
and, in syntax (sentence structure), there are sick to his stomach, sick at his stomach, sick in, sick
on, and sick with. On the level of vocabulary, examples of dialectal differences include American
English subway, contrasting with British English underground; and corn, which means maize in the
United States, Canada, and Australia, wheat in England, and oats in Scotland. Nevertheless, while
dialects of the same language differ, they still possess a common core of features.

Although some linguists include phonological features (such as vowels, consonants, and intonation)
among the dimensions of dialect, the standard practice is to treat such features as aspects of accent. In the
sound system of American English, for example, some speakers pronounce greasy with an s sound,
while others pronounce it with a z sound. Accent differences of this kind are extremely important as
regional and class indicators in every language. Their role is well recognized in Great Britain, for
example, where the prestige accent, called Received Pronunciation, is used as an educated standard and
differences in regional accent, both rural and urban, are frequent. There is far less accent variation in
Canada, Australia, and large parts of the United States.

Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

Frequently, the label dialect, or dialectal, is attached to substandard speech, language usage that deviates
from the accepted norme.g., the speech of many of the heroes of Mark Twain's novels. On the other
hand, the standard language can also be regarded as one of the dialects of a given language, though one
that has attracted special prestige. In a historical sense, the term dialect is sometimes applied to a language
considered as one of a group deriving from a common ancestor. Thus, English, Swedish, and German are
sometimes treated as Germanic dialects.

There is often considerable difficulty in deciding whether two linguistic varieties are dialects of the same
language or two separate but closely related languages; this is especially true in parts of the world where
speech communities have been little studied. In these cases especially, decisions regarding dialects versus
languages must be to some extent arbitrary.

Normally, dialects of the same language are considered to be mutually intelligible, while different
languages are not. Intelligibility between dialects is, however, almost never absolutely complete. On the
other hand, speakers of closely related languages can still communicate to a certain extent when each uses
his own mother tongue. Thus, the criterion of intelligibility is quite relative. In more-developed societies
the distinction between dialects and related languages is easier to make because of the existence of
standard languages.

Sometimes sociopolitical factors play a role in drawing the distinction between dialect and language.
Linguistic varieties that are considered dialects in one set of historical circumstances may be considered
languages in another. Before the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, Serbo-Croatian was viewed
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by its speakers as a single language consisting of several dialects, spoken in Serbia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and Croatia; afterward, local communities began to talk of Croatian and Serbian as distinct
languages.

Among the synonyms for dialect, the word idiom refers to any kind of dialect, or even language, whereas
patois, a term from French, denotes rural or provincial dialects, often with a deprecatory connotation. A
similar term is vernacular, which refers to the common, everyday speech of the ordinary people of a
region. An idiolect is the dialect of an individual person at one time. This term implies an awareness that
no two persons speak in exactly the same way and that each person's dialect is constantly undergoing
changee.g., by the introduction of newly acquired words. Most recent investigations emphasize the
versatility of each person's speech habits according to levels or styles of language usage.

Varieties of Dialects
1. Geographic Dialects
The most widespread type of dialectal differentiation is regional, or geographic. As a rule, the speech of
one locality differs at least slightly from that of any other place. Differences between neighbouring local
dialects are usually small, but, in traveling farther in the same direction, differences accumulate. Every
dialectal feature has its own boundary line, called an isogloss (or sometimes heterogloss). Isoglosses of
various linguistic phenomena rarely coincide completely, and by crossing and interweaving they constitute
intricate patterns on dialect maps. Frequently, however, several isoglosses are grouped approximately
together into a bundle of isoglosses. This grouping is caused either by geographic obstacles that arrest the
diffusion of a number of innovations along the same line or by historical circumstances, such as political
borders of long standing, or by migrations that have brought into contact two populations whose dialects
were developed in noncontiguous areas.

Geographic dialects include local ones (e.g., the Yankee English of Cape Cod or of Boston, the Russian of
Moscow or of Smolensk) or broader regional ones, such as Delaware Valley English, Australian English,
or Tuscan Italian. Such entities are of unequal rank; South Carolina English, for instance, is included in
Southern American English. Regional dialects do have some internal variation, but the differences within
a regional dialect are supposedly smaller than differences between two regional dialects of the same rank.
In a number of areas (linguistic landscapes) where the dialectal differentiation is essentially even, it is
hardly justified to speak of regional dialects. This uniformity has led many linguists to deny the
meaningfulness of such a notion altogether; very frequently, however, bundles of isoglossesor even a
single isogloss of major importancepermit the division of a territory into regional dialects. The public is
often aware of such divisions, usually associating them with names of geographic regions or provinces or
with some feature of pronunciatione.g., Southern English or Russian o-dialects and a-dialects.
Especially clear-cut cases of division are those in which geographic isolation has played the principal
rolee.g., Australian English or Louisiana French.

2. Social Dialects
Another important axis of differentiation is that of social strata. In many localities, dialectal differences
are connected with social classes, educational levels, or both. More-highly educated speakers and, often,
those belonging to a higher social class tend to use more features belonging to the standard language,
whereas the original dialect of the region is better preserved in the speech of the lower and less-educated
classes. In large urban centres, innovations unknown in the former dialect of the region frequently

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develop. Thus, in cities the social stratification of dialects is especially relevant and far-reaching, whereas
in rural areas, with a conservative way of life, the traditional geographic dialectal differentiation prevails.

Educational differences between speakers strongly affect the extent of their vocabulary. In addition,
practically every profession has its own expressions, which include the technical terminology and
sometimes also the casual words or idioms peculiar to the group. Slang too is characterized mainly by a
specific vocabulary and is much more flexible than an ordinary dialect, as it is subject to fashion and
depends strongly on the speaker's age group. Slangjust as a professional dialectis used mainly by
persons who are in a sense bidialectal; i.e., they speak some other dialect or the standard language, in
addition to slang. Dialectal differences also often run parallel with the religious or racial division of the
population.

Dialectal change and diffusion

The basic cause of dialectal differentiation is linguistic change. Every living language constantly
undergoes changes in its various elements. Because languages are extremely complex systems of signs, it
is inconceivable that linguistic evolution could affect the same elements and even transform them in the
same way in all localities where one language is spoken and for all speakers in the same locality. At first
glance, differences caused by linguistic change seem to be slight, but they inevitably accumulate with time
(e.g., compare Chaucer's English with modern English or Latin with modern Italian, French, Spanish, or
Romanian). Related languages usually begin as dialects of the same language.

When a change (an innovation) appears among only one section of the speakers of a language, this
automatically creates a dialectal difference. Sometimes an innovation in dialect A contrasts with the
unchanged usage (archaism) in dialect B. Sometimes a separate innovation occurs in each of the two
dialects. Of course, different innovations will appear in different dialects, so, in comparison with its
contemporaries, no one dialect as a whole can be considered archaic in any absolute sense. A dialect may
be characterized as relatively archaic because it shows fewer innovations than the others, or it may be
archaic in one feature only.

After the appearance of a new dialectal feature, interaction between speakers who have adopted this
feature and those who have not leads to the expansion or the curtailment of its area or even to its
disappearance. In a single social milieu (generally the inhabitants of the same locality, generation, and
social class), the chance of the complete adoption or rejection of a new dialectal feature is very great; the
intense contact and consciousness of membership within the social group fosters such uniformity. When
several age groups or social strata live within the same locality and especially when people speaking the
same language live in separate communities, dialectal differences are easily maintained.

The element of mutual contact plays a large role in the maintenance of speech patterns; that is why
differences between geographically distant dialects are normally greater than those between dialects of
neighbouring settlements. This also explains why bundles of isoglosses so often form along major natural
barriersimpassable mountain ranges, deserts, uninhabited marshes or forests, or wide riversor along
political borders. Similarly, racial or religious differences contribute to linguistic differentiation because
contact between members of one faith or race and those of another within the same area is very often
much more superficial and less frequent than contact between members of the same racial or religious
group. An especially powerful influence is the relatively infrequent occurrence of intermarriages, thus
preventing dialectal mixture at the point where it is most effectivenamely, in the mother tongue learned
by the child at home.
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Standard languages
Standard languages arise when a certain dialect begins to be used in written form, normally throughout a
broader area than that of the dialect itself. The ways in which this language is usede.g., in administrative
matters, literature, and economic lifelead to the minimization of linguistic variation. The social prestige
attached to the speech of the richest, most powerful, and most highly educated members of a society
transforms their language into a model for others; it also contributes to the elimination of deviating
linguistic forms. Dictionaries and grammars help to stabilize linguistic norms, as do the activity of
scholarly institutions and, sometimes, governmental intervention. The base dialect for a country's standard
language is very often the original dialect of the capital and its environsin France, Paris; in England,
London; in Russia, Moscow. Or the base may be a strong economic and cultural centrein Italy,
Florence. Or the language may be a combination of several regional dialects, as are German and Polish.

Even a standard language that was originally based on one local dialect changes, however, as elements of
other dialects infiltrate into it over the years. The actual development in any one linguistic area depends on
historical events. Sometimes even the distribution of standard languages may not correspond to the
dialectal situation. Dutch and Flemish dialects are a part of the Low German dialectal area, which
embraces all of northern Germany, as well as The Netherlands and part of Belgium. In one part of the
dialectal area, however, the standard language is based on High German, and in the other part the standard
language is Dutch or Flemish, depending on the nationality of the respective populations. In the United
States, where there is no clearly dominant political or cultural centresuch as London or Parisand
where the territory is enormous, the so-called standard language shows perceptible regional variations in
pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. All standard languages are in any case spoken in a variety of
accents, though sometimes one particular accent (e.g., Received Pronunciation in Britain) may be most
closely associated with the standard because of its shared social or educational origins.

In most developed countries, the majority of the population has an active (speaking, writing) or at least
passive (understanding) command of the standard language. Very often the rural population, and not
uncommonly the lower social strata of the urban population as well, are in reality bidialectal. They speak
their maternal dialect at home and with friends and acquaintances in casual contacts, and they use the
standard language in more formal situations. Even the educated urban population in some regions uses the
so-called colloquial language informally. In the German-, Czech-, and Slovene-speaking areas of middle
Europe, for example, a basically regional dialect from which the most striking local features have been
eliminated is spoken. The use of this type of language is supported by psychological factors, such as
feelings of solidarity with a certain region and pride in its traditions or the relaxed mood connected with
informal behaviour.

Written language
Historically, culturally, and in the individual's life, writing is subsequent to speech and presupposes it.
Aristotle expressed the relation thus: Speech is the representation of the experiences of the mind, and
writing is the representation of speech (On Interpretation). But it is not as simple as this would suggest.
Alphabetic writing, in which, broadly, consonant and vowel sounds are indicated by letters in sequence, is
the most widespread system in use today, and it is the means by which literacy will be disseminated, but it
is not the only system, nor is it the earliest.

Evolution of writing systems

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Writing appears to have been evolved from an extension of picture signs: signs that directly and iconically
represented some thing or action and then the word that bore that meaning. Other words or word elements
not readily represented pictorially could be assigned picture signs already standing for a word of the same
or nearly the same pronunciation, perhaps with some additional mark to keep the two signs apart. This sort
of device is used in children's word puzzles, as when the picture of a berry is used to represent, say, the
second half of the name Canterbury. This opens the way for what is called a character script, such as that
of Chinese, in which each word is graphically represented by a separate individual symbol or character or
by a sequence of two or more such characters. Writing systems of this sort have appeared independently in
different parts of the world.

Chinese character writing has for many centuries been stylized, but it still bears marks of the pictorial
origin of some characters. Chinese characters and the characters of similar writing systems are sometimes
called ideograms, as if they directly represented thoughts or ideas. This is not so. Chinese characters stand
for Chinese words or, particularly as in modern Chinese, bits of words (logograms); they are the
symbolization of a particular language, not a potentially universal representation of thought. The
ampersand (&) sign, standing for and in English printing, is a good isolated example of a logographic
character used in an alphabetic writing system.

Character writing is laborious to learn and imposes a burden on the memory. Alternatives to it, in addition
to alphabetic writing, include scripts that employ separate symbols for the syllable sequences of
consonants and vowels in a language, with graphic devices to indicate consonants not followed by a
vowel. The Devanagari script, in which classical Sanskrit and modern Hindi are written, is of this type,
and the Mycenaean writing system, a form of Greek writing in use in the 2nd millennium BCE and quite
independent of the later Greek alphabet, was syllabic in structure. Japanese employs a mixed system,
broadly representing the roots of words by Chinese characters (the Japanese learned writing from the
Chinese in and after the 5th century CE) and the inflectional endings by syllable signs. These syllable
signs are an illustration of the way in which a syllabic script can develop from a character script: certain
Chinese characters were selected for their sound values alone and, reduced in size and complexity, have
been standardized as signs of a particular consonant and vowel sequence or of a single vowel sound.

The Greek alphabet came from the Phoenician script, a syllabic-type writing system that indicated the
consonant sounds. By a stroke of genius, a Greek community decided to employ certain consonantal signs
to which no consonant sound corresponded in Greek as independent vowel signs, thus producing an
alphabet, a set of letters standing for consonants and vowels. The Greek alphabet spread over the ancient
Greek world, undergoing minor changes. From a Western version sprang the Latin (Roman) alphabet.
Also derived from the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet was devised in the 9th century CE by a Greek
missionary, St. Cyril, for writing the Slavic languages.

Written Versus Spoken Languages

For these reasons one should distinguish the grammar of a written language (e.g., written English) from
the grammar of the corresponding spoken language (spoken English). The two grammars will be very
similar, and they will overlap in most places, but the description of spoken English will have to take into
account the grammatical uses of features such as intonation, largely unrepresented in writing, and a great
deal of colloquial construction and spontaneous discourse processing; by contrast, the description of
written English must deal adequately with the greater average length of sentences and some different
syntactic constructions and word forms characterizing certain written styles but almost unknown in
ordinary speech (e.g., whom as the objective form of who).

15
In studying ancient (dead) languages one is, of course, limited to studying the grammar of their written
forms and styles, as their written records alone survive. Such is the case with Latin, Ancient Greek, and
Sanskrit (Latin lives as a spoken language in very restricted situations, such as the official language of
some religious communities, but this is not the same sort of Latin as that studied in classical Latin
literature; Sanskrit survives also as a spoken language in similarly restricted situations in a few places in
India). Scholars may be able to reconstruct something of the pronunciation of a dead language from
historical inferences and from descriptions of its pronunciation by authors writing when the language was
still spoken. They know a good deal about the pronunciation of Sanskrit, in particular, because ancient
Indian scholars left a collection of extremely detailed and systematic literature on its pronunciation. But
this does not alter the fact that when one teaches and learns dead languages today, largely for their literary
value and because of the place of the communities formerly speaking them in our own cultural history,
one is teaching and learning the grammar of their written forms. Indeed, despite what is known about the
actual pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Europeans on the whole pronounce what they read in terms of
the pronunciation patterns of their own languages.

Under present conditions, with universal literacy either an accepted fact or an accepted target, it is
assumed that, wherever it is convenient or useful, writing may be employed for any purpose for which
speech might have been used and by all sections of the community. This has not always been so. Literacy
was until the 19th century the privilege of the few. In other periods and cultures, writing was the preserve
of certain defined groups, such as the priesthood and the official class, and it was restricted to certain
purposes, such as the annals of important events, genealogical tables, and records of inventories of things
and persons. It is highly probable that writing first developed for particular types of use by particular
groups of specialists within communities and subsequently, because of its obvious utility, spread outside
these limits.

Nonverbal language

Speech and writing are, indeed, the fundamental faculties and activities referred to by the term language.
There are, however, areas of human behaviour for which the term is used in a peripheral and derivative
sense.

When individuals speak, they do not normally confine themselves to the mere emission of speech sounds.
Because speaking usually involves at least two parties in sight of each other, a great deal of meaning is
conveyed by facial expression and movements and postures of the whole body but especially of the hands;
these are collectively known as gestures. The contribution of bodily gestures to the total meaning of a
conversation is in part culturally determined and differs in different communities. Just how important
these visual symbols are may be seen when one considers how much less effective phone conversation is
as compared with conversation face to face; the experience of involuntarily smiling at the telephone
receiver and immediately realizing that this will convey nothing to the hearer is common. Again, the part
played in emotional contact and in the expression of feelings by facial expressions and tone of voice, quite
independently of the words used, has been shown in tests in which subjects have been asked to react to
sentences that appear as friendly and inviting when read but are spoken angrily and, conversely, to
sentences that appear as hostile but are spoken with friendly facial expressions. It is found that it is the
visual accompaniments and tone of voice that elicit the main emotional response. A good deal of sarcasm
exploits these contrasts, which are sometimes described under the heading of paralanguage.

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Just as there are paralinguistic activities such as facial expressions and bodily gestures integrated with and
assisting the communicative function of spoken language, so there are vocally produced noises that cannot
be regarded as part of any language, though they help in communication and in the expression of feeling.
These include laughter, shouts and screams of joy, fear, pain, and so forth, and conventional expressions
of disgust, triumph, and so on, traditionally spelled ugh!, ha ha!, and so on, in English. Such nonlexical
ejaculations differ in important respects from language: they are much more similar in form and meaning
throughout humankind as a whole, in contrast to the great diversity of languages; they are far less arbitrary
than most of the lexical components of language; and they are much nearer the cries of animals produced
under similar circumstances and, as far as is known, serve similar expressive and communicative
purposes. As noted above, some people have tried to trace the origin of language itself to them.

A language is a symbol system. It may be regarded, because of its infinite flexibility and productivity, as
the symbol system par excellence. But there are other symbol systems recognized and institutionalized in
the different cultures of humankind. Examples of these exist on maps and blueprints and in the
conventions of representational art (e.g., the golden halos around the heads of saints in religious
paintings). Other symbol systems are musical notation and dance notation, wherein graphic symbols
designate musical pitches and other features of musical performance and the movements of formalized
dances. More loosely, because music itself can convey and arouse emotions and certain musical forms and
structures are often associated with certain types of feeling, one frequently reads of the language of
music or even of the grammar of music. The terms language and grammar are here being used
metaphorically, however, if only because no symbol system other than language has the same potential of
infinite productivity, extension, and precision.

Languages are used by human beings to talk and write to other human beings. Derivatively, bits of
languages may be used by humans to control machinery, as when different buttons and switches are
marked with words or phrases designating their functions. A specialized development of human-machine
language is seen in the various computer languages now in use. These are referred to as programming
languages, and they provide the means whereby sets of instructions and data of various kinds can be
supplied to computers in forms acceptable to these machines. Various types of such languages are
employed for different purposes. The development and use of computer languages is a distinct science in
itself (see also computer science).

Language acquisition
In regard to the production of speech sounds, all humans are physiologically alike. It has been shown
repeatedly that children learn the language of those who bring them up from infancy. In most cases these
are the biological parents, especially the mother, but one's first language is acquired from environment and
learning, not from physiological inheritance. Adopted infants, whatever their physical characteristics and
whatever the language of their actual parents, acquire the language of the adoptive parents.

Different shapes of lips, throat, and other parts of the vocal tract have an effect on voice quality; this is
part of the individuality of each person's voice referred to above. Physiological differences, including size
of throat and larynx, both overall and in relation to the rest of the vocal tract, are largely responsible for
the different pitch ranges characteristic of men's, women's, and children's speech. These differences do not
affect one's ability or aptitude to speak any particular language.

Speech is species-specific to humankind. Physiologically, animal communications systems are of all sorts.
The animal sounds superficially most resembling speech, the imitative cries of parrots and some other
17
birds, are produced by very different physiological means: birds have no teeth or lips but vocalize by
means of the syrinx, a modification of the windpipe above the lungs. Almost all mammals and many other
animal species make vocal noises and evince feelings thereby and keep in contact with each other through
a rudimentary sort of communication, but those members of the animal kingdom nearest to humans
genetically, the great apes, lack the anatomical apparatus necessary for speech.

The development of speech has been linked to upright posture and the freeing of the vocal cords from the
frequent need to hold one's breath in using the arms for locomotion. Certainly, speaking and hearing
as a primary means of communicationhave a number of striking advantages: speech does not depend on
daylight or on mutual visibility; it can operate in all directions over reasonably wide areas; and it can be
adjusted in loudness to cope with distance. As is seen in crowded rooms, it is possible to pick out some
one person's voice despite a good deal of other noise and in the midst of other voices speaking the same
language. Also, the physical energy required in speaking is extremely small in relation to the immense
power wielded by speech in human life, and scarcely any other activity, such as running, walking, or tool
using, interferes seriously with the process.

The characteristics just outlined pertain to all of the world's languages. What is more a matter of
controversy is the extent to which biological inheritance is involved in language acquisition and language
use. The fact that language traditionally has been viewed as species-specific to human beings argues an
essential cerebral or mental component, and in the 19th century certain aspects of speech control and use
were located in a particular part of the human brain (the Broca area, named for the 19th-century French
surgeon who discovered it, Paul Broca).

Whether the great apes have the mental capacity to acquire at least a rudimentary form of language has
developed into an area of active research. While apes lack the anatomical structures that are necessary for
the vocalization of human speech, many investigators nevertheless claim to have taught chimpanzees,
gorillas, and orangutans to communicate in languages whose words are composed of hand signs or
geometric symbols. These claims have been hotly disputed, with critics arguing that the apes have not
demonstrated true language acquisition in the sense of understanding the words as symbolic abstractions
that can be used in new and grammatically meaningful constructions. Researchers working with the apes,
however, maintain that at least some of the apes have learned to understand and manipulate the words as
abstractions.

No one inherits the ability to speak a particular language, but normal children are born with the ability and
the drive to acquire languagenamely, the one (or ones) to which they are routinely exposed from
infancy. Children bring to this task considerable innate ability, because their exposure is largely to a
random selection of utterances (apart from any attempts at systematic teaching that they may encounter)
occurring within earshot or addressed to them. Yet by late childhood they have, through progressive
stages, acquired the basic vocabulary of at least one language, together with its phonological and
grammatical structure. This is substantially the same situation the world over, among literate and illiterate
communities, and the process takes up much the same number of years of childhood. Thus, it would
appear that all languages are roughly equal in complexity and in difficulty of mastery. Moreover, it is
thought that some two-thirds of the world's children grow up in multilingual settings, suggesting that
bilingualism is actually a more common human condition than monolingualism. Certainly, children who
acquire two languages do so at the same rate as children who acquire one language. There seems to be no
theoretical limit to the number of languages a young child is capable of acquiring.

It is therefore clear that all normal humans bring into the world an innate faculty for language acquisition,
language use, and grammar construction. The last phrase refers to the internalization of the rules of the
18
grammar of one's first language from a more or less random exposure to utterances in it. Human children
are very soon able to construct new, grammatically acceptable sentences from material they have already
heard; unlike the parrot in human society, they are not limited to mere repetition of utterances.

The part played by this innate ability and its exact nature remain unclear. Until the 1950s scholars
considered language acquisition to be carried out largely by analogical creation from observed patterns of
sentences occurring in utterances heard and understood by the child. Such a view, much favoured by
persons inclined to a behaviourist interpretation of human learning processes (e.g., the American linguist
Leonard Bloomfield), stressed the very evident differences between the structures of different languages,
particularly on the surface. Following the pioneering work of the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the
late 1950s, a number of linguists placed much more emphasis on the inherent grammar-building
disposition and competence of the human brain, which is activated by exposure to utterances in a
language, especially during childhood, in such a way that it fits the utterances into predetermined general
categories and structures. Such linguists, inheritors of the 17th- and 18th-century interest in universal
grammar, put their stress on the underlying similarities of all languages, especially in the deeper areas of
grammatical analysis (see linguistics: Transformational-generative grammar). Additional areas of
investigation in the late 20th century were the cognitive systems and abilities underlying language
acquisition and use (e.g., concept development, memory, and attention) and the relevance of social
interaction (especially language play) between child and adult. Theories of child language acquisition, as a
consequence, became more multifaceted and complex than the approaches that dominated linguistic
research in the 1970s and '80s.

Neologisms

Every living language can readily be adapted to meet changes occurring in the life and culture of its
speakers, and the main weight of such changes falls on vocabulary. Grammatical and phonological
structures are relatively stable and change noticeably over centuries rather than decades (see below
Linguistic change), but vocabularies can change very quickly both in word stock and in word meanings.
One example is the changes wrought by modern technology in the vocabularies of all European languages
since 1945. Before that date transistor, cosmonaut, and Internet did not exist, and nuclear disarmament
would scarcely have had any clear meaning.

Every language can alter its vocabulary very easily, which means that every speaker can without effort
adopt new words, accept or invent new meanings for existing words, and, of course, cease to use some
words or cease to use them in certain meanings. Dictionaries list some words and some meanings as
obsolete or obsolescent to indicate this process. No two speakers share precisely the same vocabulary
of words readily used and readily understood, though they may speak the same dialect. They will,
however, naturally have the great majority of words in their vocabularies in common.

Languages have various resources for effecting changes in vocabulary. Meanings of existing words may
change. With the virtual disappearance of falconry as a sport in England, lure has lost its original meaning
of a bunch of feathers on a string by which hawks were recalled to their handler and is used now mainly in
its metaphorical sense of enticement. The additional meaning of nuclear has already been mentioned; one
may list it with words such as computer and jet, which acquired new ranges of meaning in the mid-20th
century.

All languages have the means of creating new words to bear new meanings. These can be new creations;
Kodak is one such, invented at the end of the 19th century by George Eastman; chortle, now in general
use, was a jocular creation of the English writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll (creator of Alice in
19
Wonderland); and gas was formed in the 17th century by the Belgian chemist and physician Jan Baptista
van Helmont as a technical term in chemistry, loosely modeled on the Greek chaos (formless void).
Mostly, though, languages follow definite patterns in their innovations. Words can be made up without
limit from existing words or from parts of words; the sources of railroad, railway, and aircraft are
obvious, and so are the sources of disestablishment, first cited in 1806 and thereafter used with particular
reference to the status of the Church of England. The controversy over the relations between church and
state in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to a chain of new words as the debate proceeded:
disestablishmentarian, antidisestablishmentarian, antidisestablishmentarianism. Usually, the bits and
pieces of words used in this way are those found in other such combinations, but this is not always so. The
technical term permafrost (terrain that never thaws, as in the Arctic) contains a bit of permanent probably
not hitherto found in any other word.

A particular source of technical neologisms in European languages has been the words and word elements
of Latin and Greek. This is part of the cultural history of Western Europe, in so many ways the
continuation of Greco-Roman civilization. Microbiology and dolichocephalic are words well-formed
according to the rules of Greek as they would be taken over into English, but no records survive of
mikrobiologia and dolichokephalikos ever having been used in Ancient Greek. The same is true of
Latinate creations such as reinvestment and longiverbosity. The long tradition of looking to Latin and,
since the Renaissance, to Greek also as the languages of European civilization keeps alive the continuing
formation of learned and scientific vocabulary in English and other European languages from these
sources (late 20th-century coinages using the Greek prefix cyber- provide an example). The dependence
on the classical languages in Europe is matched by a similar use of Sanskrit words for certain parts of
learned vocabulary in some modern Indian languages (Sanskrit being the classical language of India).
Such phenomena are examples of loanwords, one of the readiest sources for vocabulary extension.

Loanwords
Loanwords are words taken into a language from another language (the term borrowing is used for the
process). Most obviously, this occurs when new things come into speakers' experiences as the result of
contacts with speakers of other languages. This is part of the history of every language, except for one
spoken by an impossibly isolated community. Tea from Chinese, coffee from Arabic, and tomato, potato,
and tobacco from American Indian languages are familiar examples of loanwords designating new
products that have been added to the vocabulary of English. In more abstract areas, several modern
languages of India and Pakistan contain many words that relate to government, industry, and current
technology taken in from English. This is the result of British rule in these countries up to independence
and the worldwide use of English as a language of international science since then.

In general, loanwords are rapidly and completely assimilated to the prevailing grammatical and
phonological patterns of the borrowing language. The German word Kindergarten, literally children's
garden, was borrowed into English in the middle of the 19th century to designate an informal school for
young children. It is now regularly pronounced as an English word, and the plural is kindergartens (not
Kindergrten, as in German). Occasionally, however, some loanwords retain marks of their foreign origin;
examples include Latin plurals such as cacti and narcissi (as contrasted with native patterns such as
cactuses and narcissuses).

Languages differ in their acceptance of loanwords. An alternative way of extending vocabulary to cope
with new products is to create a descriptive compound from within one's own language. English aircraft
and aeroplane are, respectively, examples of a native compound and a Greek loan creation for the same
thing. English potato is a loan; French pomme de terre (literally, apple of the earth) is a descriptive
20
compound. Chinese is particularly resistant to loans; aircraft, railway, and telephone are translated by
newly formed compounds meaning literally fly machine, fire vehicle, and lightning (electricity) language.
Some countries try to resist loans, believing that they reduce a language's identity or purity, and
introduce laws aimed at stopping the influx and form committees to provide native translations. Language
change, however, is never restrained by such efforts; even in countries that have followed a legal road
(such as France), loanwords continue to flow into everyday speech. It can be argued that loans add to a
language's richness and flexibility: English itself has received loans from more than 350 languages.

Language and Culture

It has been seen that language is much more than the external expression and communication of internal
thoughts formulated independently of their verbalization. In demonstrating the inadequacy and
inappropriateness of such a view of language, attention has already been drawn to the ways in which one's
mother tongue is intimately and in all sorts of details related to the rest of one's life in a community and to
smaller groups within that community. This is true of all peoples and all languages; it is a universal fact
about language.

Anthropologists speak of the relations between language and culture. It is indeed more in accordance with
reality to consider language as a part of culture. Culture is here being used, as it is throughout this article,
in the anthropological sense, to refer to all aspects of human life insofar as they are determined or
conditioned by membership in a society. The fact that people eat or drink is not in itself cultural; it is a
biological necessity for the preservation of life. That they eat particular foods and refrain from eating other
substances, though they may be perfectly edible and nourishing, and that they eat and drink at particular
times of day and in certain places are matters of culture, something acquired by man as a member of
society, according to the now-classic definition of culture by the English anthropologist Sir Edward
Burnett Tylor. As thus defined and envisaged, culture covers a very wide area of human life and
behaviour, and language is manifestly a part, probably the most important part, of it.

Although the faculty of language acquisition and language use is innate and inherited, and there is
legitimate debate over the extent of this innateness, every individual's language is acquired by man as a
member of society, along with and at the same time as other aspects of that society's culture in which
people are brought up. Society and language are mutually indispensable. Language can have developed
only in a social setting, however this may have been structured, and human society in any form even
remotely resembling what is known today or is recorded in history could be maintained only among
people speaking and understanding a language in common use.

Transmission of language and culture

Language is transmitted culturally; that is, it is learned. To a lesser extent it is taught, when parents
deliberately encourage their children to talk and to respond to talk, correct their mistakes, and enlarge their
vocabulary. But it must be emphasized that children very largely acquire their mother tongue (i.e., their
first language) by grammar construction from exposure to a random collection of utterances that they
encounter. What is classed as language teaching in school either relates to second-language acquisition or,
insofar as it concerns the pupils' first language, is in the main directed at reading and writing, the study of
literature, formal grammar, and alleged standards of correctness, which may not be those of all the pupils'
regional or social dialects. All of what goes under the title of language teaching at school presupposes and
relies on the prior knowledge of a first language in its basic vocabulary and essential structure, acquired
before school age.

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If language is transmitted as part of culture, it is no less true that culture as a whole is transmitted very
largely through language, insofar as it is explicitly taught. The fact that humankind has a history in the
sense that animals do not is entirely the result of language. So far as researchers can tell, animals learn
through spontaneous imitation or through imitation taught by other animals. This does not exclude the
performance of quite complex and substantial pieces of cooperative physical work, such as a beaver's dam
or an ant's nest, nor does it preclude the intricate social organization of some species, such as bees. But it
does mean that changes in organization and work will be the gradual result of mutation cumulatively
reinforced by survival value; those groups whose behaviour altered in any way that increased their
security from predators or from famine would survive in greater numbers than others. This would be an
extremely slow process, comparable to the evolution of the different species themselves.

There is no reason to believe that animal behaviour has materially altered during the period available for
the study of human history, say, the last 5,000 years or so, except, of course, when human intervention by
domestication or other forms of interference has itself brought about such alterations. Nor do members of
the same species differ markedly in behaviour over widely scattered areas, again apart from differences
resulting from human interference. Bird songs are reported to differ somewhat from place to place within
species, but there is little other evidence for areal divergence. In contrast to this unity of animal behaviour,
human cultures are as divergent as are human languages over the world, and they can and do change all
the time, sometimes with great rapidity, as among the industrialized countries of the 21st century.

The processes of linguistic change and its consequences will be treated below. Here, cultural change in
general and its relation to language will be considered. By far the greatest part of learned behaviour, which
is what culture involves, is transmitted by vocal instruction, not by imitation. Some imitation is clearly
involved, especially in infancy, in the learning process, but proportionately this is hardly significant.

Through the use of language, any skills, techniques, products, modes of social control, and so on can be
explained, and the end results of anyone's inventiveness can be made available to anyone else with the
intellectual ability to grasp what is being said. Spoken language alone would thus vastly extend the
amount of usable information in any human community and speed up the acquisition of new skills and the
adaptation of techniques to changed circumstances or new environments. With the invention and diffusion
of writing, this process widened immediately, and the relative permanence of writing made the diffusion
of information still easier. Printing and the increase in literacy only further intensified this process.
Modern techniques for broadcast or almost instantaneous transmission of the written and spoken word all
over the globemost recently via the Internettogether with the rapid translation services now available
between the major languages of the world, have made it possible for usable knowledge of all sorts to be
made accessible to people almost anywhere in the world. This accounts for the great rapidity of scientific,
technological, political, and social change in the contemporary world. All of this, whether ultimately for
the good or ill of humankind, must be attributed to the dominant role of language in the transmission of
culture.

Second-language learning

Language, no less than other aspects of human behaviour, is subject to purposive interference. When
people with different languages need to communicate, various expedients are open to them, the most
obvious being second-language learning and teaching. This takes time, effort, and organization, and, when
more than two languages are involved, the time and effort are that much greater. Other expedients may
also be applied. Ad hoc pidgins for the restricted purposes of trade and administration were mentioned
above. Tacit or deliberate agreements have been reached whereby one language is chosen for international
purposes when speakers of several different languages are involved. In the Roman Empire, broadly, the
22
western half used Latin as a lingua franca, and the eastern half used Greek. In western Europe during the
Middle Ages, Latin continued as the international language of educated people, and Latin was the second
language taught in schools. Later the cultural, diplomatic, and military reputation of France made French
the language of European diplomacy. This use of French as the language of international relations
persisted until the 20th century. At important conferences among representatives of different nations, it is
usually agreed which languages shall be officially recognized for registering the decisions reached, and
the provisions of treaties are interpreted in the light of texts in a limited number of languages, those of the
major participants.

Since World War II the dominance of the English-speaking peoples in science and technology and in
international commerce has led to the recognition of English as the major international language in the
world of practical affairs, with more and more countries making English the first foreign language to be
taught and thus producing a vast expansion of English-language-teaching programs all over the world.
Those whose native language is English do not sufficiently realize the amount of effort, by teacher and
learner alike, that is put into the acquisition of a working knowledge of English by educated first speakers
of other languages.

As an alternative to the recognition of particular natural languages as international in status, attempts have
been made to invent and propagate new and genuinely international languages, devised for the purpose. Of
these, Esperanto, invented by the Polish-Russian doctor L.L. Zamenhof in the 19th century, is the best
known. Such languages are generally built up from parts of the vocabulary and grammatical apparatus of
the better-known existing languages of the world. The relationship between the written letter and its
pronunciation is more systematic than with many existing orthographies (English spelling is notoriously
unreliable as an indication of pronunciation), and care is taken to avoid the grammatical irregularities to
which all natural languages are subject and also to avoid sounds found difficult by many speakers (e.g.,
the English th sounds, which most Europeans, apart from English speakers, dislike). These artificial
languages have not made much progress, though an international society of Esperanto speakers does exist.

Nationalistic influences on language

Deliberate interference with the natural course of linguistic changes and the distribution of languages is
not confined to the facilitating of international intercourse and cooperation. Language as a cohesive force
for nation-states and for linguistic groups within nation-states has for long been manipulated for political
ends. Multilingual states can exist and prosper; Switzerland is a good example. But linguistic rivalry and
strife can be disruptive. Language riots have occurred in Belgium between French and Flemish speakers
and in parts of India between rival vernacular communities. A language can become or be made a focus of
loyalty for a minority community that thinks itself suppressed, persecuted, or subjected to discrimination.
The French language in Canada in the mid-20th century is an example. In the 19th and early 20th
centuries, Gaelic, or Irish, came to symbolize Irish patriotism and Irish independence from Great Britain.
Since independence, government policy has continued to insist on the equal status of English and Irish in
public notices and official documents, but, despite such encouragement and the official teaching of Irish in
the state schools, a main motivation for its use and study has disappeared, and the language is giving
ground to English under the international pressures referred to above.

For the same reasons, a language may be a target for attack or suppression if the authorities associate it
with what they consider a disaffected or rebellious group or even just a culturally inferior one. There have
been periods when American Indian children were forbidden to speak a language other than English at
school and when pupils were not allowed to speak Welsh in British state schools in Wales. Both these
prohibitions have been abandoned. After the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Basque speakers were
23
discouraged from using their language in public as a consequence of the strong support given by the
Basques to the republican forces. Interestingly, on the other side of the Franco-Spanish frontier, French
Basques were positively encouraged to keep their language in use, if only as an object of touristic interest
and consequent economic benefit to the area.

So far, some of the relatively large-scale effects of culture contacts on languages and on dialects within
languages have been surveyed. A continuous concomitant of contact between two mutually
incomprehensible tongues and one that does not lead either to suppression or extension of either is
translation. As soon as two speakers of different languages need to converse, translation is necessary,
either through a third party or directly.

Before the invention and diffusion of writing, translation was instantaneous and oral; persons
professionally specializing in such work were called interpreters. In predominantly or wholly literate
communities, translation is thought of as the conversion of a written text in one language into a written
text in another, though the modern emergence of the simultaneous translator or professional interpreter at
international conferences keeps the oral side of translation very much alive.

The tasks of the translator are the same whether the material is oral or written, but, of course, translation
between written texts allows more time for stylistic adjustment and technical expertise. The main
problems have been recognized since antiquity and were expressed by St. Jerome, translator of the famed
Latin Bible, the Vulgate, from the Hebrew and Greek originals. Semantically, these problems relate to the
adjustment of the literal and the literary and to the conflicts that so often occur between an exact
translation of each word, as far as this is possible, and the production of a whole sentence or even a whole
text that conveys as much of the meaning of the original as can be managed. These problems and conflicts
arise because of factors already noticed in the use and functioning of language: languages operate not in
isolation but within and as part of cultures, and cultures differ from each other in various ways. Even
between the languages of communities whose cultures are fairly closely allied, there is by no means a one-
to-one relation of exact lexical equivalence between the items of their vocabularies.

In their lexical meanings, words acquire various overtones and associations that are not shared by the
nearest corresponding words in other languages; this may vitiate a literal translation. The English author
and theologian Ronald Knox pointed to the historical connections of the Greek skandalon stumbling
block, trap, or snare, inadequately rendered by offense, its usual New Testament translation. In modern
times translators of the Bible into the languages of peoples culturally remote from Europe are well aware
of the difficulties of finding a lexical equivalent for lamb when the intended readers, even if they have
seen sheep and lambs, have no tradition of blood sacrifice for expiation or long-hallowed associations of
lambs with lovableness, innocence, and apparent helplessness. The English word uncle has, for various
reasons, a cozy and slightly comic set of associations. The Latin poet Virgil used the words avunculus
Hector in a solemn heroic passage of the Aeneid (Book III, line 343); to translate this by uncle Hector
gives an entirely unsuitable flavour to the text.

The translation of poetry, especially into poetry, presents very special difficulties, and the better the
original poem, the harder the translator's task. This is because poetry is, in the first instance, carefully
contrived to express exactly what the poet wants to say. Second, to achieve this end, poets call forth all the
resources of the language in which they are writing, matching the choice of words, the order of words, and
grammatical constructions, as well as phonological features peculiar to the language in metre, perhaps
supplemented by rhyme, assonance, and alliteration. The available resources differ from language to
language; English and German rely on stress-marked metres, but Latin and Greek used quantitative
metres, contrasting long and short syllables, while French places approximately equal stress and length on
24
each syllable. Translators must try to match the stylistic exploitation of the particular resources in the
original language with comparable resources from their own. Because lexical, grammatical, and metrical
considerations are all interrelated and interwoven in poetry, a satisfactory literary translation is usually
very far from a literal word-for-word rendering. The more poets rely on language form, the more
embedded their verses are in that particular language and the harder the texts are to translate adequately.
This is especially true with lyrical poetry in several languages, with its wordplay, complex rhymes, and
frequent assonances.

At the other end of the translator's spectrum, technical prose dealing with internationally agreed scientific
subjects is probably the easiest type of material to translate, because cultural unification (in this respect),
lexical correspondences, and stylistic similarity already exist in this type of usage in the languages most
commonly involved, to a higher degree than in other fields of discourse.

Significantly, it is this last aspect of translation to which mechanical and computerized techniques have
been applied with limited success. Machine translation, whereby, ultimately, a text in one language could
be fed into a machine to produce an accurate translation in another language without further human
intervention, is most satisfactory when dealing with the language of science and technology, with its
restricted vocabulary and overall likeness of style, for both linguistic and economic reasons. Attempts at
machine translation of literature have been made, but success in this field, especially in the translation of
poetry, is still a long way off, notwithstanding the remarkable advances in automatic translation made
during the 1990sthe result of progress in computational techniques and a fresh burst of research energy
focused on the problem.

Translation on the whole is an art, not a science. Guidance can be given and general principles can be
taught, but after that it must be left to the individual's own feeling for the two languages concerned.
Almost inevitably, in a translation of a work of literature, something of the author's original intent must be
lost; in those cases in which the translation is said to be a better work than the original, an opinion
sometimes expressed about the English writer Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubiyt of Omar
Khayym, one is dealing with a new, though derived, work, not just a translation. The Italian epigram
remains justified: Traduttore traditore The translator is a traitor.

Language learning
All physiologically and mentally normal people learn the main structure and basic vocabulary of their
mother tongue by the end of childhood. It has been pointed out that the process of first-language
acquisition as a spoken medium of communication is largely achieved from random exposure. There is
legitimate controversy, however, over the nature and extent of the positive contribution that the human
brain brings, both cognitively and linguistically, to the activity of grammar constructionthe activity by
which children develop an indefinitely creative competence from the finite data that make up their actual
experience of the language. The importance of social interaction between children and their interlocutors
is another factor whose significance is coming to be appreciated. Creativity is what must be stressed as the
product of first-language acquisition. By far the greater number of all the sentences people hear and utter
during their lifetime are new; that is, they have not occurred before in their personal experience. But
individuals find no difficulty at all in understanding at once almost everything they hear or for the most
part in producing sentences to suit the requirements of every situation. This very ease of creativity in
human linguistic competence makes it hard to realize its extent. The only regularly reproduced sentences
in most speakers' experience are the stereotyped forms of greeting and leave-taking and certain formalized
responses to recurrent situations, such as shopping, cooperative activities in repetitive jobs, the stylized
parts of church services, and the like.
25
Yet, despite the truly immense achievement that the progressive mastery of one's first language
constitutes, it arouses no comment and attracts no credit. It is simply part of what is expected in growing
up. Different people may be singled out for praise in certain uses of their language, as good public
speakers, authors, poets, tellers of tales, and solvers of puzzles, but not just as speakers. The credit that
some individuals acquire in certain communities for speaking correctly is a different matter, usually the
result of speaking as one's mother tongue a prestigious standard dialect among people most of whom
speak another, less-favoured one.

Monolingualism

The state of understanding or having the knowledge to speak or write in only one language. Monoglottism
alone, solitary", + glotta, "tongue, language") or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is
the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. In a different
context, "unilingualism" may refer to a language policy which enforces an official or national language
over others.

Being monolingual or unilingual is also said of a text, dictionary, or conversation written or conducted in
only one language, and of an entity in which a single language is either used or officially recognized (in
particular when being compared with bilingual or multilingual entities or in the presence of individuals
speaking different languages).

Bilingualism
The learning of a second and of any subsequently acquired language is quite a separate matter. Except for
one form of bilingualism, it is a deliberate activity undertaken when one has already nearly or fully
acquired the basic structure and vocabulary of one's first language. Of course, many people never do
master significantly more than their own first language. It is only in encountering a second language that
one realizes how complex language is and how much effort must be devoted to subsequent acquisition. It
has been said that the principal obstacle to learning a language is knowing one already, and common
experience suggests that the faculty of grammar construction exhibited in childhood is one that is
gradually lost as childhood recedes.

Whereas all normal people master their mother tongue with unconscious ease, people vary in their ability
to learn additional languages, just as they vary in other intellectual activities. Situational motivation,
however, appears to be by far the strongest influence on the speed and apparent ease of this learning. The
greatest difficulty is experienced by those who learn because they are told to or are expected to, without
supporting reasons that they can justify. Given a motive other than external compulsion or expectation, the
task is achieved much more easily (this, of course, is an observation in no way confined to language
learning). In Welsh schools it is found that English children make slower progress in Welsh when their
only apparent reason for learning Welsh is that there are Welsh classes. Welsh children, on the other hand,
make rapid progress in English, the language of most further education, the newspapers, most television
and radio, most of the better-paid jobs, and any job outside Welsh-speaking areas. Similar differences in
motivation have accounted for the excellent standard of English, French, and German acquired by
educated persons in the Scandinavian countries and in The Netherlands, small countries whose languages,
being spoken by relatively few foreigners, are of little use in international communication. This attainment
may be compared with the much poorer showing in second-language acquisition among comparably
educated persons in England and the United States, who have for long been able to rely on foreigners
accommodating to their ignorance by speaking and understanding English.

26
It is often held that children brought up bilingually in places in which two languages are regularly in use
are slower in schoolwork than comparable monolingual children, as a greater amount of mental effort has
to be expended in the mastery of two languages. This has by no means been proved, and indeed there is
growing evidence to the contrary. Moreover, because much of a child's language acquisition takes place in
infancy and in the preschool years, it does not represent an effort in the way that consciously learning a
language in school does, and, indeed, it probably occupies a separate part of the child's mental equipment.
The question of speed of general learning by bilinguals and monolinguals must be left open. It is quite a
separate matter from the job of learning, by teaching at home or in school, to read and write in two
languages; this undoubtedly is more of a labour than the acquisition of monolingual literacy.

Two types of bilingualism have been distinguished, according to whether the two languages were acquired
from the simultaneous experience of the use of both in the same circumstances and settings or from
exposure to each language used in different settings (an example of the latter is the experience of English
children living in India during the period of British ascendancy there, learning English from their parents
and an Indian language from their nurses and family servants). However acquired, bilingualism leads to
mutual interference between the two languages; extensive bilingualism within a community is sometimes
held partly responsible for linguistic change. Interference may take place in pronunciation, in grammar,
and in the meanings of words. Bilinguals often speak their two languages each with an accent; i.e., they
carry into each certain pronunciation features from the other. The German word order in He comes
tomorrow home has been reported as an example of grammatical interference, and in Canadian French the
verb introduire has acquired from English the additional meaning introduce, make acquainted (which in
metropolitan French is prsenter).

Multilingualism
Multilingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city:
Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn
The logo of the Swiss Federal administration, in the four national languages of Switzerland (German,
French, Italian and Romansh)
Multilingualism is the use of two or more languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community
of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population.[1]
Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural
openness.[2] Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure
to multiple languages is becoming increasingly frequent, thereby promoting a need to acquire additional
languages. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.[3]
As far as learning a language, multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language
during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the
mother tongue) is acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. Children
acquiring two languages in this way are called simultaneous bilinguals. Even in the case of simultaneous
bilinguals, one language usually dominates over the other. People who know more than one language
have been reported to be more adept at language learning compared to monolinguals.[4] Additionally,
bilinguals often have important economic benefits over monolingual individuals as bilingual people are
able to carry out duties that monolinguals cannot, such as interacting with customers who only speak a
minority language.

27
Multilingualism in computing can be considered part of a continuum between internationalization and
localization. Due to the status of English in computing, software development nearly always uses it (but
see also Non-English-based programming languages), so almost all commercial software is initially
available in an English version, and multilingual versions, if any, may be produced as alternative options
based on the English original.

Language Typology
Language families, as conceived in the historical study of languages, should not be confused with the
quite separate classifications of languages by reference to their sharing certain predominant features of
grammatical structure. Such classifications give rise to what are called typological classes.

In fulfilling the requirements of open-ended creativity imposed on language by human beings,

grammatical structure has things in common in all known languages, particularly at the deeper levels of
grammar. All known languages have words or wordlike elements combined in accordance with rules into
sentences; all known languages distinguish in some way nounlike and verblike sentence components; and
all known languages have the means of embedding or subordinating one sentence within another as an
included clause (e.g., the sun set and we returned home: When the sun set we returned home; Joan was
playing tennis and Joan twisted her ankle: Joan, who was playing tennis, twisted her ankle, or while she
was playing tennis, Joan twisted her ankle). Descriptive analyses of all the languages of the world have
not yet been prepared, and, of course, there is information about only a minute number of those that are no
longer spokennamely, those few that were written. But there is enough known to make the assertion of
such universal features as have been given with fair confidence. These are often referred to as language
universals; their nature and extent is the subject of current discussion and research.

Within these very general guidelines, however, languages exhibit various types of structure. This can most
readily be seen by comparing the relations between the forms of words and their syntactic functions in
different languages. Such a comparison is the basis of three broad types of language that have been
distinguished since the beginning of the 19th century. They are, in fact, more like characteristics than
types, in that most languages contain traces of all three, in different proportions.

Classical Chinese made little or no use of word-form variation, such as is found, for example, in Latin, for
grammatical purposes. Sentence structure was expressed by word order, word grouping, and the use of
specific grammatical words, or particles. Such languages have been called isolating or analytic. Modern
Chinese languages are much less analytic than is often believed; probably, Vietnamese is the most fully
representative of this type today. Some languages string together, or agglutinate, successive bits, each with
a specific grammatical function, into the body of single words. Turkish is a typical agglutinative language:
compare Turkish evleri houses (accusative case), in which ev is the root meaning house, -ler marks
plurality, and -i is the sign for accusative, with Latin doms, in which -s combines the representation of
accusative and plural without the possibility of assigning either category separately to one part of the word
ending. Latin is in this respect an inflectional, or fusional, language. In a more extreme example, Latin
go! cumulatively represents in one fused form the verb meaning go, active voice, imperative mood,
second person, and singular number, each a grammatically distinct category.

English, like many other languages, includes features of all three types. In its use of word order alone to
distinguish grammatical differences (the dog chased the cat; the cat chased the dog), it resembles
Classical Chinese rather than Latin. In a word form such as manliness, in which each bit can be assigned a
grammatical function (man the basic noun, -li- the adjective formative, and -ness the abstract noun
28
formative), it makes use of agglutination, whereas plurals such as men and geese and past tenses such as
came and ran fuse distinct grammatical categories into a word form in which only arbitrarily can one allot
some sound segments, or letters, to one and some to the other.

Assigning languages to different types in this way involves a delicate procedure of balancing one part of
the grammar against another and deciding which type of structure predominates and how well the other
types are represented. Languages predominantly of each of the types are found in communities at all levels
of civilization and with all types of culture.

In the course of transmission, grammatical structures change, just as do pronunciation and meanings, and
in time the cumulative effect may be the transference of a language from one overall type to another,
although it remains descended from the earlier language and therefore is just as much part of the same
historical family. Latin is very different typologically from French in its grammatical structure, but French
is nevertheless the form that Latin took in France in the course of time. In the matter of the grammatical
relevance of word order, the absence of case inflections in nouns, and the use of verbal auxiliaries instead
of single word tense forms, French is more like English, a distant cousin within the Indo-European family,
than it is like Latin, its immediate progenitor (compare French j'ai donn, English I have given, Latin
ded). The two sorts of language classification, historical and typological, serve different purposes and are
differently based. Language families group languages together on the basis of descenti.e., unbroken
transmission from an earlier common parent language. The evidence is, in the main, systematic
correspondences among the shapes of words of similar meanings (e.g., Greek patr, Latin pater, French
pre, German Vater, English father). Languages are put into typological classes, with the reservation
already mentioned, on the basis of certain overall similarities of structure irrespective of historical
relations. Though these two classifications may coincide with some languages, as is the case to a great
extent in the Bantu family, they do so only contingently; being based on different data and oriented
differently, they do not logically or necessarily imply each other.

In a way, these two systems of classification involve the two most important aspects in which languages
must be seen for them to be properly understood: as products of a continuous historical process and also as
self-sufficient systems of communication in any one period. Both as a component of cultural history and
as a central part of culture itself, language is able to reveal, more than any other human activity and
achievement, what is involved in humankind's distinctive humanity.

Indo-European languages
Family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of
Southwest and South Asia. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other
Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the
rest put together; thus, Indo-Hittite has been used for a family consisting of Indo-European proper plus
Anatolian. As long as this view is neither definitively proved nor disproved, it is convenient to keep the
traditional use of the term Indo-European.

Languages of the family

The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly into the 10 main branches listed
below; these are arranged according to the age of their oldest sizable texts.

1. Anatolian
29
Now extinct, Anatolian was spoken during the 1st and 2nd millennia BC in what is presently Asian
Turkey and northern Syria. By far the best-known of its members is Hittite, the official language of the
Hittite empire, which flourished in the 2nd millennium. Very few Hittite texts were known before 1906,
and their interpretation as Indo-European was not generally accepted until after 1915; the integration of
Hittite data into Indo-European comparative grammar has, therefore, been one of the principal
developments of Indo-European studies in the 20th century. The oldest Hittite texts date from the 17th
century BC, the latest from approximately 1200 BC. For more information, see Anatolian languages.

2. Indo-Iranian
Indo-Iranian comprises two main subbranches, Indo-Aryan (Indic) and Iranian. Indo-Aryan languages
have been spoken in what is now northern and central India and Pakistan since before 1000 BC. Aside
from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium BC, the
oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda (gveda), the oldest of the
sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 BC. Examples of modern Indo-Aryan languages are
Hind, Bengali, Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka), and the many dialects of Romany, the language of the
Gypsies (Rom).

Iranian languages were spoken in the 1st millennium BC in present-day Iran and Afghanistan and also in
the steppes to the north, from modern Hungary to East (Chinese) Turkistan. The only well-known ancient
varieties of Iranian languages are Avestan, the sacred language of the Zoroastrians (Parsis), and Old
Persian, the official language of Darius I (ruled 522486 BC) and Xerxes I (486465 BC) and their
successors. Among the modern Iranian languages are Persian (Frs), Pashto (Afghan), Kurdish, and
Ossetic.

3. Greek
Greek, despite its numerous dialects, has been a single language throughout its history. It has been spoken
in Greece since at least 1600 BC, and, in all probability, since the end of the 3rd millennium. The earliest
texts are the Linear B tablets, some of which may date from as far back as 1400 BC (the date is disputed),
and some of which certainly date to 1200 BC. This material, very sparse and difficult to interpret, was not
identified as Greek until 1952.

4. Italic
The principal language of the Italic group is Latin, originally the speech of the city of Rome and the
ancestor of the modern Romance languages: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on.
The earliest Latin inscriptions apparently date from the 6th century BC, with literature beginning in the
3rd century. Scholars are not in agreement as to how many other ancient languages of Italy and Sicily
belong in the same branch as Latin. For more information on Latin, the languages derived BC from it, and
the other languages that belong to or are sometimes included in the Italic branch of Indo-European, see
Italic languages and Romance languages.

5. Germanic
In the middle of the 1st millennium BC, Germanic tribes lived in southern Scandinavia and northern
Germany. Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century BC onward are largely recorded in
history. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the 4th century AD.
Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. For more
information, see Germanic languages and English language.

6. Armenian
30
Armenian, like Greek, is a single language. Speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now
constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century BC, but the oldest Armenian texts date
from the 5th century AD. For more information, see Armenian language.

7. Tocharian
The Tocharian languages, now extinct, were spoken in the Tarim Basin (in present-day northwestern
China) during the 1st millennium AD. Two distinct languages are known, labeled A (East Tocharian, or
Turfanian) and B (West Tocharian, or Kuchean). One group of travel permits for caravans can be dated to
the early 7th century, and it appears that other texts date from the same or from neighbouring centuries.
These languages became known to scholars only in the first decade of the 20th century; they have been
less important for Indo-European studies than has Hittite, partly because their testimony about the Indo-
European parent language is obscured by 2,000 more years of change and partly because Tocharian
testimony fits fairly well with that of the previously known non-Anatolian languages. For more
information, see Tocharian languages.

8. Celtic

Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Christian era over a wide area of Europe,
from Spain and Britain to the Balkans, with one group (the Galatians) even in Asia Minor. Very little of
the Celtic of that time and the ensuing centuries has survived, and this branch is known almost entirely
from the Insular Celtic languagesIrish, Welsh, and othersspoken in and near the British Isles, as
recorded from the 8th century AD onward. For further information, see Celtic languages.

9. Balto-Slavic
The grouping of Baltic and Slavic into a single branch is somewhat controversial, but the exclusively
shared features outweigh the divergences. At the beginning of the Christian Era, Baltic and Slavic tribes
occupied a large area of eastern Europe, east of the Germanic tribes and north of the Iranians, including
much of present-day Poland and what was formerly the western Soviet Unionnamely, Belarus, Ukraine,
and westernmost Russia. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small, perhaps centred in what is
now southern Poland. But in the 5th century AD the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of
the 20th century the Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of eastern Europe and northern Asia.
The Baltic-speaking area, however, contracted, and by the end of the 20th century Baltic languages were
confined to Lithuania and Latvia.

The earliest Slavic texts, written in a dialect called Old Church Slavonic, date from the 9th century AD;
the oldest substantial material in Baltic dates to the end of the 14th century, and the oldest connected texts
to the 16th century. For more information, see Baltic languages and Slavic languages.

10. Albanian

Albanian, the language of the present-day republic of Albania, is known from the 15th century AD. It
presumably continues one of the very poorly attested ancient Indo-European languages of the Balkan
Peninsula, but which one is not clear. For more information, see Albanian language.

In addition to the principal branches just listed, there are several poorly documented extinct languages of
which enough is known to be sure that they were Indo-European and that they did not belong in any of the

31
groups enumerated above (e.g., Phrygian, Macedonian). Of a few, too little is known to be sure whether
they were Indo-European or not (e.g., Ligurian).

The parent language: Proto-Indo-European

By comparing the recorded Indo-European languages, especially the most ancient ones, much of the
parent language from which they are descended can be reconstructed. This reconstructed parent language
is sometimes called simply Indo-European, but in this article the term Proto-Indo-European is preferred.

Characteristic developments of Indo-European languages

As Proto-Indo-European was splitting into the dialects that were to become the first generation of daughter
languages, different innovations spread over different territories.

1. Changes in phonology

In phonology, the most striking changes have been loss or reduction in many languages of final or
unaccented syllables, and loss in several languages of certain consonants between vowels, often followed
by contraction of the resulting vowel sequence. Thus words in modern Indo-European languages are often
much shorter than their Proto-Indo-European ancestors.

2. Changes in morphology
As a result of the fact that much of the marking of Proto-Indo-European inflectional categories was done
in final syllables, loss and reduction of these syllables have often had serious grammatical consequences.
In the noun, loss of endings has generally led to loss or great reduction of the case and gender systems,
while ways have generally been found to salvage the distinction between singular and plural. In Modern
Persian, for example, where all final syllables have been lost, the old case and gender distinctions have
disappeared also, but plural number is still regularly marked

3. Vocabulary changes
Changes in vocabulary have been even greater than those in sounds and grammar. Words in modern Indo-
European languages have several sources. They may be recognizable loanwords, such as English skunk,
chain, and inch (from Algonquian, French, and Latin, respectively); they may have been formed within
the history or prehistory of the language itself, such as English radar and rightness; they may be of
obscure origin, such as English drink, which is common Germanic but has no cognates outside Germanic,
or boy, which is peculiar to English and Frisian; or they may be inherited words that have changed
meaning, such as English merry from Proto-Indo-European * - short.'

Non-Indo-European influence on the family

Indo-European languages, like all languages, have always been subject to influence from neighbouring
languages, both related and unrelated.

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The influence of non-Indo-European languages on the sounds and grammar of Proto-Indo-European is not
demonstrable, partly because there is no direct evidence about the languages that were in contact with
Indo-European before roughly 3000 BC. It can be surmised, however, that some words are loans.

When Indo-European languages have been carried within historic times into areas occupied by speakers of
other languages, they have generally taken over a number of loanwords, as with English and Spanish in
the Americas or Dutch in South Africa. Aside from the special case of pidgin and creole languages,
however, there has been comparatively little effect on sounds and grammar. These have been significantly
affected within historic times only when an Indo-European language has been spoken in prolonged close
contact with non-Indo-European speakers, as with Ossetic (an Iranian language) in the Caucasus, or when
its speakers have been very strongly influenced culturally by speakers of a non-Indo-European language,
as with Persian, in which Arabic plays much the same role as Latin does in English.

In prehistoric times most branches of Indo-European were carried into territories presumably or certainly
occupied by speakers of non-Indo-European languages, and it is reasonable to suppose that these
languages had some effect on the speech of the newcomers. For the lexicon, this is indeed demonstrable in
Hittite and Greek, at least. It is much less clear, however, that these non-Indo-European languages affected
significantly the sounds and grammar of the Indo-European languages that replaced them. Perhaps the best
case is India, where certain grammatical features shared by Indo-European and Dravidian languages
appear to have spread from Dravidian to Indo-European rather than vice versa. For most other branches of
Indo-European languages any attempt to claim prehistoric influence of non-Indo-European languages on
sounds and grammar is rendered almost impossible because of ignorance of the non-Indo-European
languages with which they might have been in contact.

History of the English Language

A short history of the origins and development of English
The history of the English language really started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes who invaded
Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, crossed the North
Sea from what today is Denmark and northern Germany. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a
Celtic language. But most of the Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly
into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Angles came from "Englaland" [sic] and their language
was called "Englisc" - from which the words "England" and "English" are derived.
Map of Germanic invasions
Germanic invaders entered Britain on the east and south coasts in the 5th century

Old English (450-1100 AD)

The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into what we now call
Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today. Native English speakers now would have
great difficulty understanding Old English. Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in
Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old
English. Old English was spoken until around 1100.
Example of Old English

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Part of Beowulf, a poem written in Old English

Middle English (1100-1500)

In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), invaded and conquered
England. The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which became
the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business classes. For a period there was a kind of
linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. In the
14th century English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added. This
language is called Middle English. It was the language of the great poet Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it
would still be difficult for native English speakers to understand today.
Example of Middle English
An example of Middle English by Chaucer

Modern English
Early Modern English (1500-1800)
Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in pronunciation (the Great Vowel
Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had
contact with many peoples from around the world.
This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words and phrases entered the
language. The invention of printing also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books
became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English.
Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London, where most publishing houses were,
became the standard. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published.
Example of Early Modern English
Hamlet's famous "To be, or not to be" lines, written in Early Modern English by Shakespeare

Late Modern English (1800-Present)

The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern
English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and
technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter
of the earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries.

Varieties of English
From around 1600, the English colonization of North America resulted in the creation of a distinct
American variety of English. Some English pronunciations and words "froze" when they reached America.
In some ways, American English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is.
Some expressions that the British call "Americanisms" are in fact original British expressions that were
preserved in the colonies while lost for a time in Britain (for example trash for rubbish, loan as a verb
instead of lend, and fall for autumn; another example, frame-up, was re-imported into Britain through
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Hollywood gangster movies). Spanish also had an influence on American English (and subsequently
British English), with words like canyon, ranch, stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words
that entered English through the settlement of the American West. French words (through Louisiana)
and West African words (through the slave trade) also influenced American English (and so, to an extent,
British English).
Today, American English is particularly influential, due to the USA's dominance of cinema, television,
popular music, trade and technology (including the Internet). But there are many other varieties of
English around the world, including for example Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian
English, South African English, Indian English and Caribbean English.

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