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Dr. Jon Aske

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Languages of the World
An Introduction to Linguistics

How many languages?

How many languages are there in the world? What is a language and what is a dialect? Why are some languages rather similar to each other whereas others are so different? These are some questions that people often have about language. I will try to answer them, and a few more, here for you in as non-technical a language as possible.

How many languages are there in the world? Well, linguists who have done the counting say that there are anywhere between 5,000 and 6,000 languages in the world today. That is probably more than you thought, isn't it?

Now, why did I say "between 5,000 and 6,000", and not 5,439, for instance? The reason is largely that it is often very hard to know when two forms of speech (or "language varieties") are different languages and when they are two dialects of the same language. (I said "speech" because most languages still do not have written forms and because speech is much more fundamental and basic than writing, having been around for perhaps about 100,000 years, whereas writing is a much more recent invention and dependent on speech).

Languages and dialects

A dialect, technically speaking, is a variety, or version, of a language that is common to a larger population, spoken by a certain recognizable subset of that population. This use of the word dialect is different from the non-technical use in which a dialect is a lesser language, or a bad form of a language. For a linguist everybody speaks a dialect. (See below for a look at standard languages, or rather, standard dialects.)

By definition, all dialects of a language are pretty much mutually intelligible, that is, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another without having to learn a new "language".

Any speech form with noticeable differences in pronunciation, vocabulary ("words"), grammatical constructions ("rules"), and so on may be called a dialect. When the differences are primarily in pronunciation, linguists typically speak of different accents rather than different dialects.

Some dialects are primarily geographical, that is they are spoken by people in a certain geographical area, but some are class-based, that is, they are spoken by certain segments of the population across geographical areas. It all has to do with who people associate and identify with.

A major problem in categorizing languages and dialects arises because it is hard to know what "mutually intelligible" means. Do you understand Australians, or Britons, or people from Alabama, when they speak English? One may answer "Sometimes". Or "after a couple of weeks I started understanding most of it." In other words, intelligibility is a fluid and relative measure.

The definition of what is a language and what is a dialect is further complicated by political considerations. Take a look at the following facts:

  • Serbs and Croats (as well as Bosnians) speak the same language, Serbo-Croatian. However Serbian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian in the Latin alphabet (like English). The same thing happens with the main languages of India and Pakistan, which are basically the same language, though they are called Hindi and Urdu, respectively, and which are also written with different scripts.
  • The languages we know as Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are really quite close to each other and it doesn't take a speaker of one of them very long to understand the others. They are basically the same language too, but they go by different names.
  • On the other hand, what we call Chinese is a collection of languages, not dialects, which are not mutually intelligible. Speakers of Cantonese cannot understand speakers of Mandarin, unless they have learned Mandarin first. However, the two languages use the same ideographic (non-sound-based) script and speakers of either language can read a common text.

So, as you can see some the picture of what is a language and what is a dialect of a language is more complicated than it might seem at first thought.

Language similarities

Another interesting question is that of why some languages seem to be similar to each other. Thus you may have noticed that there are similarities between English and German, or between French and Spanish, or even between English and Spanish.

Similarities among languages can arise from one of three possible scenarios.

Chance similarities

One possibility is that the similarities are due to chance. This is generally not the case when it comes to vocabulary, but it may be the case for structural features of language, i.e. grammar, the sort of thing that linguists study.

Thus, for instance, does a language put its objects before or after the verb? In that language, do they say: (a) I ate an apple, or (b) I an apple ate? Well, there are only two possibilities, so the fact that Turkish and Japanese (and about half of the world's languages) do it the second way is probably just a coincidence of sorts (after all there are only two choices).

Also, many languages, such as Spanish or Japanese, have only five vowel sounds (not to be confused with vowel letters). English and French have over 10 each, but many languages only have five and they are often the same five. The reason for this would seem to be that that is a rather efficient number of vowels for a number of reasons having to do with language processing and production factors. (Still, nothing prevents a language from developing more vowels.)

Borrowing in language contact situations

The second possibility, and this applies to both structural factors but, primarily, vocabulary, is that one language may "borrow" a feature from another. In other words, when two languages are in contact, meaning basically that some speakers are bilingual, features from one language, such as words for things (nouns) and actions (verbs) or descriptions (adjectives and adverbs) from one language often are borrowed into the other language. (Borrowing is often rather uneven, so that one language ends up borrowing more from the other than vice versa, for a variety of reasons I won't get into.)

English borrowed many words from French in the Middle Ages for instance, while the French speaking Normans occupied England for several centuries (but were never more than 10% of the population, albeit an important and powerful 10%). Thus English had a perfectly way of saying go in, but it borrowed the verb enter nonetheless. Spanish speakers living in the US often borrow many words from the English that surrounds (and engulfs) them, even when a perfectly good word already exists in Spanish.

Relatedness: Language families

The third reason for similarities between languages, and this applies equally to both vocabulary and grammar, is that the languages may be related. Now, how can two languages be related? Languages don't have families or relatives. Well, they do in a way. Let me explain.

As I said earlier, languages often have different dialects, variants, or varieties. Now the reason why languages have dialects is that languages change all the time. They don't often change fast enough for any one individual to be able to tell any major differences in his or her lifetime, but they do change, sometimes faster, sometimes more slowly, but they change nonetheless. The English that we speak is not the same as the English spoken 500 years ago, and definitely not the same as the English spoken 1000 or 2000 years ago, which to you would be sound definitely like a foreign language, as foreign as modern German.

The changes happen quite naturally through innovation (and/or borrowing) of words, sounds, and grammatical constructions. In situations of language contact changes tend to occur faster. In relatively isolated communities they tend to occur more slowly.

To the extent that different individuals and different communities stay together and their members continue to communicate with each other, the innovations will pretty spread out evenly and the language will change for everybody the same way. But to the extent that communities become isolated from each other, they will change in different directions and pretty soon, in say 1000 or 2000 years, two communities that became separated will be speaking languages which are not mutually intelligible. But they will still be relatively similar to each other. That is what linguists call for two languages to be related.

English has some close relatives, such as Dutch, German, Danish, and others, the so-called Germanic languages. Likewise, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and a few other languages, the so-called Romance languages, are closely related in that they are all daughter languages of Latin (the language of the Romans, the inhabitants of Rome and founders of the Roman empire).

Less obvious perhaps is the fact that the Romance languages and the Germanic languages are all (more remotely) related to each other, as well as to other groups of languages, such as the Slavic languages, which includes Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Serbo-Croatian, among others. All these subfamilies form part of the Indo-European family of languages, one of the most successful families in the world in terms of numbers and distribution. Other members of this family include Hindi-Urdu and Iranian in Asia (part of the Indo-Iranian subfamily) and the Celtic subfamily, which includes Breton, Irish (Gaelic) and Scottish (Gaelic).

There are many other language families in the world, about 50 altogether (again, it's hard to tell). About 18 of these families only have one member language (such as Basque, or Euskara, a language spoken in the western Pyrenees between Spain and France since before the Romans took over western Europe and their language overtook all languages spoken there (Basque has about half a million speakers, all of whom nowadays also speak either Spanish or French). Other families have quite a few more members. Some families have billions of speakers (Indo-European has about 2,000 million and Sino-Tibetan about 1,000 million) and some have very few (the Australian aborigine family has about 25,000 speakers only). Some languages have hundreds of millions of speakers (English has about 350 million, Spanish about 250 million) and some have only a handful.

In Africa there are a handful of major language families: Afro-Asiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan. Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, form a subfamily of Afro-Asiatic. In North and Central America, some 10 major families of indigenous languages are recognized (although whether some of these are related to each other is much more controversial). In South America there are another five major families. (This is without counting the three hegemonic languages of the Americas, Spanish, English, and Portuguese, which are all members of the same language family.)

The more closely related two languages are the more similar they are. Thus, no matter how different English and German, or English and Spanish, may seem to you, the similarities outweigh the differences when you compare them with Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, or Mohawk. A famous linguist earlier this century remarked that, when compared with other languages of the world, European languages are all extremely similar and he referred to them as a group as "Standard Average European" (SAE).

Endangered languages

Although the world has between five and six thousand languages, experts agree that less than half of these languages will survive the next century. These are all minority languages which are surrounded by majority languages with much greater resources, such as mass media, and numbers of speakers.

Much like species in the dwindling rain forests of the world, many languages are dying all the time in the latter part of the twentieth century. The pattern is quite familiar: A people with a distinctive language first becomes bilingual and after a few short generations the ancestral language of that people is lost forever.

Standard languages

Although pretty much all languages have dialects, some languages have a privileged variety (dialect), or family of related varieties, which are called the standard. Standard languages are typically first and foremost written languages, which people then use in speech to different degrees of approximation. Standard English (or englishes) is something like what educated members of the English speaking world speak. Standard Spanish is also what originally elites, and now large segments of the educated population, spoke in countries with large Spanish-speaking populations.

It is common for people who speak languages that have a standard to think that the standard is the "correct" or "true" form of the language and that non-standard varieties are incorrect, or "bad" versions of the language. From a linguistic point of view, value judgements about language varieties are nonsensical. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about "dropping one's R's", for instance. In England it is well thought of, since it is associated with higher classes, whereas in New York it is typically stigmatized, since it is associated with lower-class speakers. And there is nothing intrinsically better or worse about saying 'harassment (with the stress on the ha part), as they do in England, as opposed to ha'rassment (with the stress on the rass part), as we say it in the United States. The same thing is true about many other features of language.

It has been clearly demonstrated that all language varieties have their own internal grammar and their own logic and that no language varieties are illogical or ungrammatical, they are just different. And many features are actually quite arbitrary, and thus "non-logical", in all languages.

This doesn't mean that linguists believe it's a good idea for languages to split into as many varieties as possible. No linguist will deny the value for society of having a standard language which everybody in the society at large (the larger community) can use to communicate with each other (even if at home they speak something somewhat different).

On the other hand, disparaging language varieties just because they are different from the standard (non-standard) can do nothing but alienate speakers of those non-standard varieties, especially if those speakers associate the standard variety with segments of the population which they view as hostile, as is the case with many African-Americans in the Unites States, for instance. This is what the recent controversy about Ebonics in California was all about (see Ebonics links below).

by Dr. Jon Aske

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General linguistics links

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Endangered/Minority languages

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Salem State College - Department of Foreign Languages
Page URL: www.lrc.salemstate.edu/aske/lgsworld.htm
Last updated: Nov 27, 1998
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