The development of languages can be compared to the process of reproduction of living organisms. In past centuries, their number was much smaller than today; there were so-called “proto-languages”, which were the ancestors of our modern speech. They broke up into many dialects, which were distributed throughout the planet, changing and improving. Thus, various language groups were formed, each of which descended from one “parent”. Based on this criterion, such groups are classified into families, which we will now list and briefly consider.
The largest family in the world
As you might have guessed, the Indo-European language group (more accurately, it is a family) consists of many subgroups that are spoken throughout much of the world. Its distribution area is the Middle East, Russia, all of Europe, as well as the countries of America that were colonized by the Spaniards and the British. Indo-European languages are divided into three categories:
Native speeches
Slavic language groups are very similar in both sound and phonetics. They all appeared at about the same time - in the 10th century, when the Old Church Slavonic language, invented by the Greeks - Cyril and Methodius - for writing the Bible, ceased to exist. In the 10th century, this language split, so to speak, into three branches, among which were the eastern, western and southern. The first of them included the Russian language (Western Russian, Nizhny Novgorod, Old Russian and many other dialects), Ukrainian, Belarusian and Rusyn. The second branch included Polish, Slovak, Czech, Slovinian, Kashubian and other dialects. The third branch is represented by Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Slovenian. These languages are common only in those countries where they are official, and Russian is the international one.
Sino-Tibetan family
This is the second largest language family, which covers the entire area of South and Southeast Asia. The main “protolanguage,” as you guessed, is Tibetan. All who come from him follow him. These are Chinese, Thai, Malay. Also language groups belonging to the Burmese regions, Bai language, Dungan and many others. Officially, there are about 300 of them. However, if you take into account adverbs, the number will be much higher.
Niger-Congo family
The linguistic groups of the peoples of Africa have a special phonetic system, and, of course, a special sound, unusual for us. A characteristic feature of the grammar here is the presence of nominal classes, which is not found in any Indo-European branch. Indigenous African languages are still spoken by people from the Sahara to the Kalahari. Some of them “assimilated” into English or French, some remained original. Among the main languages that can be found in Africa, we highlight the following: Rwanda, Makua, Shona, Rundi, Malawi, Zulu, Luba, Xhosa, Ibibio, Tsonga, Kikuyu and many others.
Afroasiatic or Semito-Hamitic family
There are language groups spoken in North Africa and the Middle East. It also still includes many of the dead languages of these peoples, such as Coptic. Of the currently existing dialects that have Semitic or Hamitic roots, the following can be named: Arabic (the most widespread in the territory), Amharic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, Assyrian, Maltese. Also often included here are the Chadic and Berber languages, which are essentially spoken in Central Africa.
Japanese-Ryukyuan family
It is clear that the distribution area of these languages is Japan itself and the adjacent Ryukyu Island. Until now, we have not finally figured out from which proto-language all those dialects that are now used by the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun originated. There is a version that this language originated in Altai, from where it spread, along with its inhabitants, to the Japanese islands, and then to America (the Indians had very similar dialects). There is also an assumption that the birthplace of the Japanese language is China.
All languages change over time. A comparison of the Russian language of the period of the “Tale of Bygone Years”, the times of A.S. Pushkin and the modern one shows us how language changes for centuries.
If two people who speak the same language are placed in different places, over time their languages will change in many directions. Firstly, they will have a different accent, then the vocabulary of the language will change (either under the influence of other languages, or due to natural processes). When this happens, different dialects emerge; but still people speaking different dialects will be able to understand each other. If dialects continue to develop on their own, there will come a time when spoken language will be impossible to understand. At this stage, people will begin to speak different languages.
There is a striking example in the history of Western civilization emergence of different languages from one. Latin language was the language of the Roman Empire, AD. With the collapse of the empire in the 4th century, different parts of Europe: Italian Peninsula, Gaul, Iberian Peninsula, Carpathians became isolated from each other along with the peoples who inhabited them and spoke Latin (folk Latin). The languages of these peoples began to develop independently and modern languages were formed: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, etc..
Modern languages of India: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengal come from Sanskrit language spoken in North India.
Old Persian gave rise to languages such as Farsi, Kurdish And Pashto.
Over time, in the context of various migrations of peoples, one language can develop into a whole family languages.
A group of related languages with one common ancestor is called a language family. Languages of one groups are closely related languages that split in the last 1000 - 2000 years ( Latin, for example, gave rise to Romanesque group languages Indo-European family).
Languages of different groups of the same family can be considered as related languages. In most families, the separation of such languages occurred more than 2000 years ago. The timeline is different for every family.
Within the same family, languages share many grammatical features and a large number of keywords, especially words of earlier origin, which indicate a common origin. The table below gives an example of a word comparison "month" in various Indo-European languages:
You can compare this word month in languages of other language families (non-Indo-European).
Languages. Dialects.
The difference between the concept " language" And "dialect" may be more political than linguistic. For example, linguistically Croatian And Serbian dialects of the same language that are very close to each other. However, they use different scripts; and people speaking these languages belong to different religions: Catholic Christianity in Croatia and Orthodox Christianity in Serbia. For political reasons, these languages are considered separate.
Bulgarians consider Macedonian language dialect of their language, while they themselves Macedonians they call it a separate language. Since Bulgaria has long laid claim to Macedonia as part of its own territory, the motives of each side become quite understandable!
Low German(which is spoken in Northern Germany) And Dutch (Netherlands) from a linguistic point of view are dialects of the same language, but politically they are different languages. Low German And Swiss German languages differ so much that speakers of these languages may not understand each other, but both are considered German. Between languages spoken in different cities Italy, much more differences than between Dutch, Norwegian And Swedish.
Main language Iraq And Morocco counts Arab, which is different here and there. Official language of China counts m Andarinsky
– other languages of the republic are considered as dialects (for example Cantonese And at), while they are sometimes very different from each other.
By studying languages and their relationships, we gain insight into the migration of peoples over the course of history. We can also trace when the domestication of plants, the domestication of animals, and the appearance of tools took place. Each language is a unique way of thinking. Those peoples who live in isolated parts of the world and are not technologically developed have a less perfect language than those peoples who live in modern cities. Every language has simple and complex parts. But the complexity of a language does not depend on the lifestyle of the people who speak it (compare the grammar of Latin and French, Old Russian and Russian).
Languages evolve like living organisms, and languages that descend from the same ancestor (called a "protolanguage") are part of the same language family. A language family can be divided into subfamilies, groups and subgroups: for example, Polish and Slovak belong to the same subgroup of West Slavic languages, part of the Slavic languages group, which is a branch of the larger Indo-European family.
Comparative linguistics, as its name suggests, compares languages in order to discover their historical connections. This can be done by comparing the phonetics of languages, their grammar and vocabulary, even in cases where there are no written sources of their ancestors.
The more distant languages are from each other, the more difficult it is to detect genetic connections between them. For example, no linguist doubts that Spanish and Italian are related, however, the existence of the Altaic language family (including Turkish and Mongolian) is questioned and not accepted by all linguists. At present, it is simply impossible to know whether all languages originate from a single ancestor. If a single human language existed, then it must have been spoken ten thousand years ago (if not more). This makes comparison extremely difficult or even impossible.
List of language families
Linguists have identified more than one hundred major language families (language families that are not considered related to each other). Some of them consist of only a few languages, while others consist of more than a thousand. Here are the main language families of the world.
| Language family | range | Languages |
|---|---|---|
| Indo-European | From Europe to India, modern times, by continent | More than 400 languages spoken by almost 3 billion people. These include Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French...), Germanic (English, German, Swedish...), Baltic and Slavic languages (Russian, Polish...), Indo-Aryan languages (Persian, Hindi, Kurdish, Bengali and many other languages spoken from Turkey to Northern India), as well as others such as Greek and Armenian. |
| Sino-Tibetan | Asia | Chinese languages, Tibetan and Burmese languages |
| Niger-Congo (Niger-Kordofanian, Congo-Kordofanian) | Sub-Saharan Africa | Swahili, Yoruba, Shona, Zulu (Zulu language) |
| Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic-Hamitic) | Middle East, North America | Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew...), Somali language (Somali) |
| Austronesian | Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Pacific, Madagascar | More than a thousand languages, including Filipino, Malagasy, Hawaiian, Fijian... |
| Ural | Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, Northern Asia | Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Sami languages, some Russian languages (Udmurt, Mari, Komi...) |
| Altai (disputed) | from Turkey to Siberia | Turkic languages (Turkish, Kazakh...), Mongolian languages (Mongolian...), Tungus-Manchu languages, some researchers include Japanese and Korean here |
| Dravidian | South India | Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu |
| Thai-Kadai | Southeast Asia | Thai, Laotian |
| Austroasiatic | Southeast Asia | Vietnamese, Khmer |
| Na-Dene (Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit) | North America | Tlingit, Navo |
| tupi (Tupian) | South America | Guarani languages (Guarani languages) |
| Caucasian (disputed) | Caucasus | Three language families. Among the Caucasian languages, the largest number of speakers is Georgian |
Special cases
Isolated languages (isolate languages)
An isolate language is an “orphan”: a language whose belonging to any known language family has not been proven. The best example is the Basque language, which is spoken in Spain and France. Even though it is surrounded by Indo-European languages, it is very different from them. Linguists have compared Basque to other languages spoken in Europe, to Caucasian languages, and even to American languages, but no connections have been found.
Korean is another well-known isolate, although some linguists suggest a connection to the Altaic languages or Japanese. Japanese itself is sometimes considered an isolate, but it is best described as belonging to the small Japanese family, which includes several related languages such as Okinawan.
Pidgin and Creole languages
A pidgin is a simplified communication system that developed between two or more groups that do not have a common language. It does not come directly from one language, it has absorbed the characteristics of several languages. When children begin to learn pidgin as a first language, it develops into a full-fledged, stable language called a creole.
Most pidgin or creole languages spoken today are the result of colonization. They are based on English, French or Portuguese. One of the most widely spoken creole languages is Tok Pisin, which is the official language of Papua New Guinea. It is based on English, but its grammar is different, its vocabulary including many loanwords from German, Malay, Portuguese and several local languages.
On this page you will find information about interesting facts related to language families of the world, individual languages or their number systems.
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The numbers after the names of the languages indicate the number of speakers, according to Levin's book.
Indo-European family
The most studied and most widely spoken family of languages in the world. Similarities between IE languages have been noted since ancient times; but the realization that they were descended from a once-existing parent language, and the important connection with the Indo-Iranian languages, was first clearly stated by William Jones in 1786. Over the course of a century, scientists reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European language for the first time.
One of the striking distinctive features of PIJ is changes in root vowels in conjugation: rare cases of such remnants can be found in the forms of English verbs, for example: sing/sang/sung. PIEJA had a rich system of inflections, three numbers (singular/dual/plural) and three genders.
German group.
The earliest texts in Germanic languages that survive today are the Gothic translations of the Bible in the 4th century. The earliest English texts date back to the 7th century. But English did not come from Old Germanic; rather, both of these languages came from Proto-Germanic.
Italian group.
From several Italic languages ( Oscan, Umbrian and Faliscan), spoken in Italy since ancient times, only one Latin has survived. Some of them continued to exist in the 1st century AD, but all modern Romance languages are descended from Latin. Earliest texts in Romance languages: French texts from the 9th century AD.
We have an array of texts in ; the earliest date from around 500 BC. There are many sayings in Latin that are still used today, such as: Venimus ad Galliam sed non currimus,“We are going to Gaul, but we are not fleeing,” or Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.AmarumetindecorumestaVesuviointerfici, “It is sweet and decent to die for one’s country. BitterlyAndindecentbeburiedatVesuvius»
.
Celtic group.
Irish is one of the official languages of Ireland. In Ireland, government agencies are also named in Irish.
The earliest evidence of writing in Celtic languages dates back to the 1st century - these are inscriptions in the Gaulish language.
Celtic numbers are preserved in counting sets in English, called scores; they are used in counting sheep, stitches, and in children's games. Here's an example: yan, tan, tethera, petera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, covera, dik.
Greek group.
Mycenaean Greek era Linear B, dating back to the early 14th century BC, also belongs to this group, as proven by Michael Ventris in 1952. Linear B has nothing in common with , which was invented centuries later; the invented alphabet began to use syllabary.
Tocharian A and B are two extinct languages that were once spoken in Xinjiang. Their existence became known only in the 1890s.
Albanian was one of the last languages to be classified as part of the Indo-European family. It replaced a significant part of the Indo-European vocabulary.
.
Baltic group.
Slavic group.
The earliest Slavic texts date back to the 9th century.
Anatolian group.
Texts in Hittite dating back to the 17th century BC are today the most ancient Indo-European texts, which were discovered only about a century ago. They represent the most obvious confirmation of historical-linguistic forecasting - namely, Saussure's postulation coefficientssonantiques. This is evidence for the existence of so-called laryngals in Proto-Indo-European, which had no evidence in any known IE language at that time, but which ended up in Hittite. On the other hand, the Hittite language turned out to be little similar to other IE languages, which led to the need to re-evaluate the parent language. Some believe that Hittite and Indo-European were branches of the earlier "Indo-Hittite" language.
Indo-Iranian group.
There are ancient inscriptions in Persian dating back to the 6th century BC, as well as Sanskrit texts dating back to around 1000 BC.
In the 18th century, having become acquainted with Sanskrit, European scientists identified its similarities with Greek and Latin. This marked the beginning of philological research, which ended with the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language (chauvinistically called Indogermanisch, because the research was mainly carried out by German scientists). It was previously believed that Sanskrit was closest to the parent language, but with the results of linguistic research, it turned out that this was not the case. Linguists retain respect for the precision of ancient Sanskrit grammars such as Panini (4th century BC).
Ardhamagadhi, one of the post-Sanskrit dialects. Prakrit is the language of Jain scripture.
Elamite language
In ancient times it was spoken in the southwestern part of Persia. The earliest inscriptions date back to the 25th century BC. There is no established connection with other languages, although Roulin, following McAlpine, classifies it as a Dravidian language.
Dravidian group
They are spoken mainly in the southern part of India, but there are regions further north, in particular Brahui, in Pakistan, where these languages are also spoken. It is likely that the Dravidian languages were once common throughout India, but were then supplanted Aryan(Indo-European) tribes three thousand years ago. Features of Dravidian languages such as retroflex consonants, spread to Indian languages, and Sanskrit, in turn, had a huge influence on the Dravidian languages.
Nakhali
The genetic affiliation of the impudent people to one or another language family has not been determined. About 40% of the vocabulary is similar to the vocabulary Munda languages, and some linguists classify this language as belonging to this group. Of the numbers, 2-4 are borrowed from Dravidian languages, and 5-10 from Indian.
Burushaski
An isolated language that is spoken in a remote area of the Pakistani part of Kashmir. The language is connected with the Caucasian languages due to its four-gender system (masculine, feminine, living gender, other subjects), and with the Basque language, due to its ergative system and type of sentence construction - SOV, but such only typological similarities can hardly serve as a strong basis for establishing linguistic kinship.
Afro-Asian family
Semitic group
Semitic languages are distinguished by inflections, which are characterized by changes in vowels, in relation to the triconsonantal root. For example, the Arabic root KTB produces verb forms such as kataba- “he wrote” katabat"she wrote" taktubu"you write", taka:taba"to correspond with each other" yukattibu“to make you write”; and nominal forms: kita:b"book", kutubi: "salesman", kita:b"writer", maktaba"library" and so on.
Semitic languages also have one of most ancient writing systems, which dates back to the Akkadian period around 3000 BC. There are Canaanite inscriptions dating back to the 20th century BC. Hebrew Bible Tanakh was written between 1200 and 200 AD. BC.).
The earliest dates back to the 4th century AD. However, for example classical Arabic language is the Koran, the appearance of which dates back to the 7th century. In regions where Arabic is spoken, there is diglossia, when spoken and written languages diverge greatly. Throughout the Arab world, the standard written language (which, by the way, is also used in formal speech) is classical Arabic, which no one speaks as a native language anymore - but it is necessarily taught in school. The spoken language has deviated greatly from this standard and varies from country to country. Uneducated Arabs from different parts of the Arab world can no longer understand each other. Egyptian the family of languages boasts one of the oldest written records (from 3000 BC). This writing dates back 4500 years! Even Chinese writing only appeared ca. 2700 BC The modern Egyptian language is a descendant not of ancient Egyptian, but of ancient Arabic. Modern descendant of the language of the pharaohs - Coptic, is still used as the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians. Nimbia, a dialect of the Guandara language belonging to the Chadian family, is known for its duodecimal number system. 12- " tùni", 13 - " tùnim`béda"— “12 + 1”, 30 — gùmebinìshídé– “24 + 6”, etc.
Sumerian language
Basque
Etruscan
Meroitic language
Meroitic was the language of Meroe, an ancient kingdom located south of Egypt.
Hurrian language
Caucasian family
Caucasian languages (which many scholars divide into two or even four unrelated families) have a characteristic word order like SOV and an ergative case system - which indicates similarities with the Basque language. This similarity has led to numerous speculations and theories, but no evidence of a connection between these languages has been obtained. Caucasian languages are also characterized by a rather bizarre system of consonants - in the Ubykh language, for example, there are 82 consonant phonemes.
Nilo-Saharan family
Khoisan family
Unusual characters in the Khoisan languages (spoken in southwest Africa) are clicking sounds, used as phonemes only in this group and some neighboring Bantu languages. Kung language (!Xu~ ), of this family differs from other languages in that it has the largest number of phonemes: 141. In most languages, the number of phonemes varies between 20 and 40.
Kordofanian family
These languages are usually grouped with the Niger-Congo languages into the Niger-Kordofanian family.
The Niger-Congo family has not been fully studied (although some of its subfamilies, such as the Bantu, are well classified). There are no forms of reconstruction of the Proto-Niger-Congo language on a par with IE, Semitic, Austronesian, Algonquian, etc. languages.
Interesting fact about language krongo: Numbers are verbs. (The same thing is observed in some Amerind languages.)
Niger-Congo family
Most of the languages of Africa (from about the southern border of the Sahara) belong to this large family. This is a real test for the Latin alphabet: most of the languages of this family not only distinguish between open and closed sounds e And O(in the letter they are depicted as e And e
, O And O
), but also tonality. Some languages have words with a "floating tone", which is not associated with any syllable in the word, but is implemented in the whole word!
The numerical system of the Niger-Congo languages is based primarily on the quinary system. The numbers "6-9", for example, often look like "5 + 1-4". Sometimes changes in sound make the origin of a word unclear (cf. the Spanish word once= 10 + 1) or borrowing (for example, in the Swahili language 6-9 are borrowed from Arabic). Other word formation methods are also possible. Sometimes a separate word is used to denote the number “8” (it itself apparently formed from “two fours”), and “9” = 8 + 1; also, to express the number “7”, the word for the number “6” is used. The numbers "9" and sometimes "8" can be expressed as "10 minus 1 (or 2)".
For more complex numbers, Bantu languages tend to use tens, while Western languages tend to use twenties.
The Yoruba number system is characterized by its use of subtraction, for example: 19 ookandinlogun = 20 — 1, 46 = 60 — 10 — 4, 315 orindinnirinwoodinmarun = 400 — (20 * 4) — 5.
The word "7" in Kumbundu (Bantu language), sambuari, is a derivative of "6 + 2" - serving as a euphemism, replacing the original word for "7", which itself is taboo.
As can be seen from Johnston's study of the Tanzanian language in the 1919 and 1970s, compound words for the numbers "6-9" have been replaced in many languages by numbers borrowed from Swahili (which in turn were borrowed from Arabic).
Ural family
About existence Ural family was already known in the 18th century. The earliest evidence of Finnish languages is an inscription in Karelian from the 13th century; inscriptions in Ugric and Hungarian date back to 1200. In view of the obvious typological similarities with the Altaic languages, a connection between these families cannot be ruled out.
Altai family
The present genetic classification of the Altaic languages raises strong doubts: the complexity of the issue lies in the fact that these languages existed in mutual contact for several thousand years, so it is not easy to separate borrowings from genetic relatedness.
Korean
The relationship of the Korean language with any other language has not been established. There may be a distant connection with Japanese and Altaic languages.
Japanese
Sino-Tibetan family
Chinese languages are tonal, like Thai languages and languages Hmong- but they are not closely related. Tibeto-Burman languages are generally not tonal. in Chinese date back to the 17th century BC; in Tibetan - by the 7th century. AD; in Burmese - by the 12th century. AD
Chang (Dzorgai) languages. Information on this branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family has only recently come to the attention of Western scholars, thanks to Chinese research in the 80s and 90s. The now dead Tangut or Si Xia language belongs to this family, which is clearly represented in the logographic form of an 11th century inscription.
Miao-yao
Tai-Kadai languages
Thai languages were once common in southern China as far as the Yangtze River. The Tai-Kadai and Chinese languages have had a strong influence on each other, so that it is not so easy to determine which was borrowed from where. Previously, it was believed that the Thai and Chinese languages are related to each other, but now this is in great doubt, since the similarity is due to borrowings.
Austroasiatic languages
Yumbri is the first language I came across where no numbers at all. There are words meaning “little” and “many”. It is noteworthy that neremoy, seems to correspond to the concept of "one" in other Austroasiatic languages, e.g. Rengao mói'?
Ainu language
Austronesian family
The Austronesian family is the largest language family in the world, numbering about 1000 individual languages. The Proto-Austronesian language has been partially reconstructed.
People often think that linguists classify languages into families based on similar-sounding words. In fact, they take as a basis regular sound matches in languages, whether the words sound the same or not. A good example is the eastern group of Santo languages: words iedh(Sakao language) and tharr(Shark Bay language) sound completely different, just like the word *
vati(language of proto-Vanuatu). But in fact, they are all words with the same root, indicating the connection between these languages.
Linguist Jacques Guy reconstructed the changes in words as follows. In both languages, labiolabial consonants have changed to dental consonants before front vowels, with the loss of final vowels: *
vati —> *thati —> *that.
In addition, a complex shift in vowels was observed in the Sakao language, after which almost all consonants became weakened: voiceless plosives and voiced fricatives, fricatives and approximants (frictional sonorants) appeared: *
that —> *thet —> *yedh.
Finally, in Shark Bay, final -t changed to vibrating: *
that —> *tharr. Q.E.D.
Chukotka-Kamchatka languages
Yukaghir
Yenisei
Gilyatsky
Indo-Pacific macrofamily
The Indo-Pacific macrofamily is a poorly understood group of 60 or more small language families in New Guinea. Genetic connections between these languages, if any, cannot be precisely determined until grammatical and lexical interpenetrations on a large scale have been carefully analyzed.
Australian languages
A classification of the Australian languages into small families has been made, but assembling them into a larger family has proven extremely difficult. R.M.U. Dixon believes the language family tree model is not entirely appropriate for Australia. Here, most likely, the situation is as follows: hundreds of languages existed in a dynamic equilibrium, grammatical features and lexemes transferred from one language to another in different regions or throughout the continent.
Many Australian languages have a limited range of numbers. (This does not mean that these are simple languages - these languages are quite complex). Some number words do not represent a specific number, but a range of numbers.
The following examples are thought-provoking, taken from the Yir Yoront language, where there is a full range of numbers, but counting in most Australian languages stops at 2, 3 or 4. As in many languages, the words in Yir Yoront for numbers are refer directly to the process of counting on hands: 5 = “whole hand”, 7 = “whole hand + two fingers”, 10 = “two hands”.
Amerind languages
In Indo-European languages we are accustomed to numbers whose roots cannot be further analyzed. In other families, number names may be derived words, often associated with the process of counting with fingers and toes - for example, in the Choctaw language "5" = talhlhaapih“the first (hand) is over”; Bororo "7" - ikerametúyapogedu- “my hand, and my friend’s”; Klamath "8" - ndan-ksahpta“3 fingers that I bent”; unalite "11" - atkahakhtok"down to your feet"; Shasta "20" - tsec“man” (a person is considered to consist of 20 countable limbs).
Na-den
Navajo is one of the Amerindian languages with the largest number of speakers in the United States, with approximately 100,000 speakers.
Greenberg combined all the Amerind languages below (that is, excluding the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene languages) into a single family, Amerindian. His conclusions are based only on "mass comparison" and not on the method of comparative analysis, which is not accepted by some linguists.
North American languages are fairly well studied, and many families are well classified, with reconstructed forms of proto-languages available. However, in South America the situation is different. Let's see what happens in fifty years.
Almosan languages
Algonquian languages
Cree is one of the Native American languages with the largest number of speakers in Canada, with approximately 80,000 speakers.
Keres
Sioux
Azteco-Tanoan macrofamily
Nahuatl (Aztec) is a language known for its base-20 number system: for example, “37” is campoallioncaxtolliomome"20 + 17". There is also a special word for "400" tzontli(literally “hair”, figuratively “abundance”). The numbers 1 to 19 are grouped in groups of five (for example, "17" is caxtolliomome“15 and 2”), so the system can more accurately be called the “5-20 system”.
Otomang languages
The northern dialect of the Pama language is interesting for its octal number system.
Penuti language
Many languages of Mexico, Central America and California have a number of number systems based on the number 20 rather than 10. This is not always obvious with numbers from 11 to 19, because some of which may be compound words, as in the decimal system. However, numbers above 19 provide clarity: for example, 100 is “five times twenty,” etc.
The Mayan languages have a developed writing system that was only fully deciphered in this century. This writing system has a separate symbol for the number zero.
Chibchan languages
Some Amazonian languages, such as Yanomami, have only roots for the numbers 1 through 3. This does not mean (as some observers are quick to conclude) that people can only count to 3. They have fingers and toes, and they know how to use them for counting. If a Yanomami Indian leaves you 20 arrows and leaves, and when he returns he is missing at least one, woe to you. Perhaps the lack of names for numbers allows you to come up with special names each time depending on the situation.
Andean languages
Quechua is one of the most widely spoken Amerindian languages, spoken by more than 7 million people. It was this language that was the language of the Inca Empire, and also spread thanks to the missionary work of Spanish-speaking colonialists.
The Incas exchanged account information using kipu s (literally "knots"), bundles of knots in the form of strings. One or more numbers were written on each line, and the lines were grouped into colored bundles, sometimes accompanied by a final score, as in a table. The numeric code was decimal; each number was represented by a number of nodes from 0 to 9; the knots were made in different ways, so several numbers could be encoded on one line.
The Urarina language (Ruhlen included this language in this group, but other linguists consider this language to be an isolate) has two very unusual features among all languages of the world: it does not have the /r/ sound (for example, the word pusaq"8" was borrowed from the form fusa-), the word order in a sentence in this language is OVS (object-verb-subject).
Equatorial group
Guarani can be considered the most effective modern Amerindian language. It is spoken by the majority (88%) of the population of Paraguay - the bulk of which are mestizos, not pure Indians. This may be why the language has gained popularity in Paraguayan society. In Paraguay, both Spanish and Guarani can be spoken.
Hepano-Caribbean languages
The Bakairi language has a binary number system: numbers above 2 ( ahage) are formed by combining words meaning “1” and “2” (although such a count ends at 6, and after that the word is repeated mera"this"). Computer geeks will argue that a binary system should only have words for “0” and “1,” but for example, our own decimal number system doesn’t work that way either: we have a word for the number “ten.”
IN Cherente language word meaning number "2" ( ponhuane), literally translated as “deer footprint” (apparently due to the cloven imprint of a deer hoof).
Pidgin and Creole languages
Although the languages in this section are almost all based on Western European languages, there are pidgin and creole languages that are based on languages from other families. Two of them are Amerindian languages: Chinook jargon And mobile language of commerce. Other examples: pidgin hammer(based on the Omoto Hamer language), hiri motu(based on Austronesian language motu), kituba(based on Congolese languages), and fanagalo(another Bantu pidgin).
The Michif language is difficult to understand: (too simplified), the nouns, pronouns and numerals (except 1) are French, the verbs are from Cree - quite complex verbs, by the way. This language cannot be considered a pidgin. Most likely, this language developed in a bilingual environment.
There are also artificial languages, information about which will be no less interesting. But about them - in the following articles.
I think many of us have heard the famous legend about the construction of the Tower of Babel, during which people angered God so much with their quarrels and squabbles that he divided their single language into a great multitude, so that, not being able to communicate with each other, people could not swear. . This is how we spread throughout the world, each nation with its own linguistic dialect, its own culture and traditions.
According to official data, there are now from 2,796 to more than 7,000 languages in the world. Such a big difference comes from the fact that scientists cannot decide what exactly is considered a language and what is a dialect or adverb. Translation agencies are often faced with the nuances of translation from rare languages.
In 2017, there are approximately 240 language groups, or families. The largest and most numerous of them is Indo-European, to which our Russian language belongs. A language family is a collection of languages united by the sound similarity of word roots and similar grammar. The basis of the Indo-European family is English and German, which form the backbone of the Germanic group. In general, this language family unites peoples occupying the bulk of Europe and Asia.
This also includes such common Romance languages as Spanish, French, Italian and others. The Russian language is part of the Slavic group of the Indo-European family, along with Ukrainian, Belarusian and others. The Indo-European group is not the most numerous in terms of the number of languages, but they are spoken by almost half of the world’s population, which gives it the opportunity to bear the title of “the most numerous”.
The next family of languages includes more than 250,000 people: Afro-Asian a family that includes Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic and many other languages, including extinct ones. This group consists of more than 300 languages of Asia and Africa, and is divided into Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, Omotian, Chadian and Berber-Libyan branches. However, the Afro-Asiatic family of languages does not include about 500 dialects and dialects, which are often used in Africa only orally.
Next in terms of prevalence and complexity of study - Nilo-Saharan a family of languages spoken in Sudan, Chad, and Ethiopia. Since the languages of these lands have significant differences among themselves, their study is not only of great interest, but also great difficulties for linguists.
Over a million native speakers include Sino-Tibetan a group of languages, but Tibeto-Burmese The branch includes more than 300 languages, spoken by as many as 60 million people around the world! Some of the languages of this family still do not have their own written language and exist only in oral form. This makes them much more difficult to study and research.
The languages and dialects of the peoples of Russia belong to 14 language families, the main of which are Indo-European, Uralic, North Caucasian and Altai.
- About 87% of the population of Russia belongs to the Indo-European language family, and 85% of it is occupied by the Slavic group of languages (Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians), followed by the Iranian group (Tajiks, Kurds, Ossetians), the Romance group (Gypsies, Moldovans) and Germanic group (Jews, Yiddish speakers, Germans).
- The Altai language family (approximately 6.8% of the Russian population) consists of the Turkic group (Altaians, Yakuts, Tuvinians, Shors, Chuvash, Balkars, Karachais), the Mongolian group (Kalmyks, Buryats), the Tungus-Manchu group (Evenks, Evens, Nanais) and the Paleo-Asian group of languages (Koryaks, Chukchis). Some of these languages are currently in danger of extinction, as their speakers are partly switching to Russian, partly to Chinese.
- The Uralic language family (2% of the population) is represented by the Finnish group of languages (Komi, Margeans, Karelians, Komi-Permyaks, Mordovians), Ugric (Khanty, Mansi) and Samoyed groups (Nenets, Selkups). More than 50% of the Uralic language family are Hungarians and about 20% are Finns. This includes linguistic groups of peoples living in areas of the Ural Range.
The Caucasian language family (2%) includes the Kartvelian group (Georgians), the Dagestan group (Lezgins, Dargins, Laks, Avars), the Adyghe-Abkhazian (Abkhazians, Adygeis, Kabardians, Circassians) and the Nakh groups (Ingush, Chechens). The study of the languages of the Caucasian family is associated with great difficulties for linguists, and therefore the languages of the local population are still very little studied.
Difficulties are caused not only by the grammar or rules for constructing the language of a given family, but also by pronunciation, which is often simply inaccessible to people who do not speak this type of language. Certain difficulties in terms of study are also created by the inaccessibility of some mountainous regions of the North Caucasus.