How many languages are there in the world? How many languages are there in the world? Stephen R. Anderson. Newsmax Finance reports todays business news headlines, live financial news stream, finance news for readers seeking the latest in business news current events. ICCOIN carries a variety of quarter sets and collects, including state quarters and national park quarters. Visit our website today to order yours! Shopping Cart 0 Items 1999-2009 State Quarter Mint and Proof Sets Price: $999.95 (5) Note: Only 11 left 15 Years Prestige Proof Sets w/3pc 1976 Silver Set Price: $2,399.95 (4) Note: Only 12 left SAVE.
Download this document as a pdf. The object of inquiry in linguistics is human language, in particular the extent and limits of diversity in the world’s languages. One might suppose, therefore, that linguists would have a clear and reasonably precise notion of how many languages there are in the world. It turns out, however, that there is no such definite count—or at least, no such count that has any status as a scientific finding of modern linguistics. The reason for this lack is not (just) that parts of the world such as highland New Guinea or the forests of the Amazon have not been explored in enough detail to ascertain the range of people who live there. Rather, the problem is that the very notion of enumerating languages is a lot more complicated than it might seem. Home » About » Organizational Structure » Offices » Treasurer of the United States » U.S. Presently, the Mint has two very popular coin programs; the 50 State Quarter Program, which honors the individual states through a new series of and.There are a number of coherent (but quite different) answers that linguists might give to this apparently simple question. More than you might have thought! When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for instance, resulted in answers like “probably several hundred.” However we choose to count them, though, this is not close. When we look at reference works, we find estimates that have escalated over time. The 1. 91. 1 (1. 1th) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, implies a figure somewhere around 1,0. That is not due to any increase in the number of languages, but rather to our increased understanding of how many languages are actually spoken in areas that had previously been underdescribed. Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations (such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, now known as SIL International) with an interest in translating the Christian Bible. As of 2. 00. 9, at least a portion of the bible had been translated into 2,5. The most extensive catalog of the world’s languages, generally taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of Ethnologue (published by SIL International), whose detailed classified list as of 2. Did you know that (most) languages belong to a family? A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another. The best known languages are those of the Indo- European family, to which English belongs. Considering how widely the Indo- European languages are distributed geographically, and their influence in world affairs, one might assume that a good proportion of the world’s languages belong to this family. That is not the case, however: there are about 2. Indo- European languages, but even ignoring the many cases in which a language’s genetic affiliation cannot be clearly determined, there are undoubtedly more families of languages (about 2. Indo- European family. Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Out of Ethnologue’s 6,9. Europe, while 2,1. Asia. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua- New Guinea, where there are an estimated 8. That makes the average number of. Photo credit: Minna Sundbergspeakers around 4,5. These languages belong to between 4. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark. We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the way places. Centuries of French governments have striven to make that country linguistically uniform, but (even disregarding Breton, a Celtic language; Allemannisch, the Germanic language spoken in Alsace; and Basque), Ethnologue shows at least ten distinct Romance languages spoken in France, including Picard, Gascon, Proven. Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre- contact times, over 3. North America. Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. But that still leaves about 1. North America’s indigenous languages spoken at least to some extent today. Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree of that diversity (and we discuss below the problem of how to quantify it), one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising proportion of the world’s languages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak. Fewer than there were last month.. Whatever the world’s linguistic diversity at the present, it is steadily declining, as local forms of speech increasingly become moribund before the advance of the major languages of world civilization. When a language ceases to be learned by young children, its days are clearly numbered, and we can predict with near certainty that it will not survive the death of the current native speakers. The situation in North America is typical. Of about 1. 65 indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by as many as 1. About 7. 5 are spoken only by a handful of older people, and can be assumed to be on their way to extinction. While we might think this is an unusual fact about North America, due to the overwhelming pressure of European settlement over the past 5. Around a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than a thousand remaining speakers, and linguists generally agree in estimating that the extinction within the next century of at least 3,0. Ethnologue, or nearly half, is virtually guaranteed under present circumstances. The threat of extinction thus affects a vastly greater proportion of the world’s languages than its biological species. What happens when a language “dies”? Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died and were reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should we question the wisdom of that choice? But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the language was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no longer the principal language of the Jewish people. During this time, it remained an object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And there are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that language death is reversible. The economic argument does not really supply a reason for speakers of a “small” and perhaps unwritten language to abandon that language simply because they also need to learn a widely used language such as English or Mandarin Chinese. Where there is no one dominant local language, and groups with diverse linguistic heritages come into regular contact with one another, multilingualism is a perfectly natural condition. When a language dies, a world dies with it, in the sense that a community’s connection with its past, its traditions and its base of specific knowledge are all typically lost as the vehicle linking people to that knowledge is abandoned. This is not a necessary step, however, for them to become participants in a larger economic or political order. For further information about the issues involved in language endangerment, see the LSA’s FAQ “What is an endangered language?”Count the flags! To this point, we have assumed that we know how to count the world’s languages. It might seem that any remaining imprecision is similar to what we might find in any other census- like operation: perhaps some of the languages were not home when the Ethnologue counter came calling, or perhaps some of them have similar names that make it hard to know when we are dealing with one language and when with several; but these are problems that could be solved in principle, and the fuzziness of our numbers should thus be quite small. But in fact, what makes languages distinct from one another turns out to be much more a social and political issue than a linguistic one, and most of the cited numbers are matters of opinion rather than science. The late Max Weinreich used to say that “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” He was talking about the status of Yiddish, long considered a “dialect” because it was not identified with any politically significant entity. The distinction is still often implicit in talk about European “languages” vs. African “dialects.” What counts as a language rather than a “mere” dialect typically involves issues of statehood, economics, literary traditions and writing systems, and other trappings of power, authority and culture — with purely linguistic considerations playing a less significant role. For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese, Hakka, Shanghainese, etc. They are not mutually intelligible, but their status derives from their association with a single nation and a shared writing system, as well as from explicit government policy. In contrast, Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same system (referred to in earlier times as “Hindustani”), but associated with different countries (India and Pakistan), different writing systems, and different religious orientations. Although varieties in use in India and Pakistan by well- educated speakers are somewhat more distinct than the local vernaculars, the differences are still minimal—far less significant than those separating Mandarin from Cantonese, for example. Commemorative Coins - US Mint Catalog. Since the modern commemorative coin program began in 1. U. S. Mint has raised more than $5. Vietnam War Memorial, preserve historical sites like George Washington's home, support various Olympic programs, and much more. Although these coins are legal tender, they are not minted for general circulation. Each commemorative coin is produced by the U. S. Mint in limited quantity and is only available for a limited time.
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