Language Classification by Numbers (Oxford Linguistics)

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Its approachable style will appeal to general readers seeking to know more about the relationship between linguistic and human history. How do Linguists Classify Languages? Correlations Between Genetic and Linguistic Data 6. Climbing Down from the Trees: Quantitative Methods Beyond the Lexicon. It fills a great need for an introductory survey of numerical methods in language classification. It serves very well as a gentle yet informative introduction to the field, and does so in a very accessible way that makes it a good read for the general linguist, as well as for anyoen contemplating taking up numerical classification in the future.

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Very accessible; does not presuppose mastery of any theoretical framework, even though it is theoretically committed.

Not much on results from formal semantics. In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Edited by Keith Brown, — Summary of Corbett without detailed analyses of specific phenomena. Condenses in a single entry a useful typological overview of all aspects of number. Number and inner space: A study of grammatical number in English.

Presses Universitaires de Laval. Rather distant from linguistic mainstream especially from formal approaches ; useful discussion of noncanonical interpretations. The emergence of a cognitive system. A broad, nontechnical discussion of the cognitive bases of language and number, centered on the analysis of grammatical number and numeral constructions to develop a global view of language combining a social-communicative and an individual-psychological perspective.

In Algebraic semantics in language and philosophy. By Godehard Link, — Center for the Study of Language and Information. The total speaking population is 8. The designations of all but two of the 44 Quechuan languages include the name Quechua along with a geographical identifier, reflecting a close relationship, though in most cases not mutual intelligibility. Most are small, with a few thousand speakers. About a dozen others range from the tens of thousands to around ,, and a few more are spoken by several hundred thousand. All three belong to what is known as Peripheral Quechua, a sister branch to Central Quechua.

These two branches constitute the major break in the Quechuan family. Quechua is, along with Spanish, the official language in Peru. Phonological, structural, and lexical similarities between Quechua and Aymara have raised the possibility that the two are related, as discussed by Orr and Longacre and Kaufman and Berlin, , but Adelaar , argues instead that the many similarities must have resulted from intense contact predating the protolanguages along with subsequent diffusion.

Part of the reasoning is that the lexical similarities are in fact too similar where they occur and extend to only about a quarter of the vocabulary, while the rest is highly different. Jensen and Grimes , Kaufman and Berlin , and Rodrigues and Cabral regard the Tupian languages of Central Amazonia as a language stock—a grouping of languages families not fully established but thought to be distantly related. Here it is listed as an established family, following Kaufman , Campbell , and Ethnologue. This set of 76 languages is grouped into 11 small branches and isolates and one major branch, Tupi-Guarani, which some recognize as a family in and of itself Michael et al.

Its 51 languages are found in parts of Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia but once covered a much larger expanse of South America, from the eastern coast to the west and from northern Argentina up to French Guiana. Yagua is known to have belonged to the Peba-Yaguan family, whose other two members are extinct.

Beyond what is presented here, Campbell discusses many plausible and possible genetic relationships within South America. Campbell and Grondona , p. As with spoken languages, it is impossible to trace back to the time when the first sign languages were used.

Still, McBurney documents early reports on signing by the deaf, including an Ancient Egyptian text from around bce: Signing systems developed into languages as communities of users grew and the communicative needs of the deaf were recognized by governments, educators, and the general public.

In parts of Europe, emerging deaf communities were developing sign languages well before the 18th century, and in Thomas Gallaudet established the first permanent deaf school in the United States, basing his methods on practices already in place in France and Britain. Ethnologue lists sign languages for the deaf, each one named for the location where it is used.

ASL has become the most widely used sign language of the deaf, with , users in North American, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and Africa. ASL and other sign languages are not closely connected to the spoken languages of the regions where they are used. Sign languages also develop in response to other needs. A famous case is Plains Indian Sign Language, once used as a lingua franca by Native Americans over a vast expanse of North America and still in use in some regions Davis, Sign languages that have arisen in Aboriginal Australia in response to speech taboos and ritual observance have been described by Kendon Pidgins are simplified languages that arise out of a need to communicate among speakers lacking a common language, typically in colonial situations where one group is dominant.

Members of the dominated group fuse grammatical features, often simplified, of their native language called the substrate with vocabulary from the dominant, or superstrate, language.

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The resulting language serves restricted purposes, such as trade. There are not many pidgins. Ethnologue lists only 16, six of them in Africa and five in Oceania, if Indonesia is included. Hiri Motu, an official language of Papua New Guinea, is noteworthy because it goes against some typical views of pidgins. This language developed between the Motu and their trading partners nearby before any European contact. After colonization, its use spread, though the colonizers themselves had little if any knowledge of it.

More usual are the cases of the original Chinese Pidgin English, once known as Pigeon English, which arose in 17th-century China for trade with the British, and Nigerian Pidgin, which developed in the same era, again due to trade contact with the British, notably the slave trade. The two had similar outcomes, eventually fading away—Hiri Motu in favor of Tok Pisin, a widely spoken creole of New Guinea, and Chinese Pidgin English in favor of Standard English, which came to be commonly taught in schools.

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Since then, a different language called Chinese Pidgin English has arisen on the Pacific island of Nauru, for communicating with Chinese-speaking merchants and traders. By contrast, Chinese Pidgin English and Nigerian Pidgin had analogous origins for communicating with traders in a dominant position , yet different outcomes, since the first has died out, while the second has vastly expanded its uses and its speaking population. Currently Nigerian Pidgin is learned by many children at an early age for communication with peers in virtually any informal situation.

Creoles are first languages of members of speech communities but originate from types of language contact resembling, if not always identical to, situations that give rise to pidgins. Being acquired as a first language gives creoles a stability that pidgins lack, and so it is not surprising that many more creoles are in current use—93 listed in Ethnologue—than pidgins. Thirty-two creoles are spoken around Latin America and the Caribbean, 26 in Oceania, and 22 in Africa.

Like pidgins, creoles have a substrate and a superstrate. English is the superstrate for 33 creoles, Malay for 14, Portuguese for 13, and French for Probably the most vigorously debated topic in current pidgin and creole studies is how creoles form and evolve. Bickerton , interpreted creolization in terms of what is known as the bioprogram hypothesis. This would see creoles as developing from a pidgin that learners were exposed to at an early age. This idea excited those who saw its potential to shed light on the human language faculty in general. At the same time, among creolists, the bioprogram hypothesis gave rise to a literature that almost universally sought to disprove it.

Viewed more positively, it engendered lots of new thinking on how creoles come about. Veenstra surveys some of the progress made during this period. Another criticism cited the fact that some creoles develop without having a pidgin as a source. One area of agreement is that neither pidgins nor creoles are homogeneous types, as earlier work seemed to assume. There are many varieties, as is found with the rest of the languages covered in this essay. Ethnologue and Glottolog are comprehensive, frequently updated databases on languages and language families.

Both sites list all known languages and language families, with extensive bibliographies. Included on the Ethnologue website are nearly language maps and several tables of statistics on the largest languages. Ethnologue also exists in print form, as three volumes listed under Simons and Fennig in section 8. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online is a database of typological information on languages of the world.

The data are collected by a team of 55 from grammars and other descriptive materials and organized into 99 chapters on areas of phonology, morphology, and syntax. The site is frequently updated with comments and corrections. An online database of scholarly hypotheses about possible language families and their membership is Multitree. A pronouncing dictionary of selected words from nearly world languages is at Forvo.

Audio pronunciations for over , words are available for some languages, down to a few hundred for others.

Its search functions permit one to identify languages by country and by levels of endangerment. The entry for each language includes its number of speakers, alternate names, and geographical coordinates. A complementary print atlas with 13 chapters by experts on the languages of different world is published by UNESCO in five languages. The next section includes a reference to the English-language version.

Atlas of the world's languages 2d ed.

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Scientific American , 3 , — A reconstruction and historical analysis of a proto-language and proto-culture. Ancient genomes link early farmers from Atapuerca in Spain to modern-day Basques. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 38 , — Problems in the taxonomy of the Uralic languages in the light of modern comparative studies. Sbornik statei k letiiu A.

An essay in classification. A classification and description of Africa's largest language family.

Language Classification by Numbers

University Press of America. A historical-comparative reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan. Khoisan languages and linguistics: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium, January 8—12, Studies in African language classification. The languages of Africa. Long-range comparisons of Tamil and Dravidian with other language families in Eurasia.

Association of Tamil Research. Journal of the American Oriental Societ y, 96 2 , — A history of the Hindi grammatical tradition: Hindi-Hindustani grammar, grammarians, history, and problems. Review of the book The Dene-Yeniseian connection , by J. International Journal of American Linguistics , 77 , — Telling general linguists about Altaic. Journal of Linguistics , 35 , 65— Indo-European and its closest relatives: The Eurasiatic language family. A festschrift for Vitaly V.

Institute for the Study of Man. Transeurasian verbal morphology in a comparative perspective: Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks. New perspectives in historical linguistics.

Modern Languages and Linguistics

A look through the prism of the great dictionary of modern Chinese dialects. The role of migration and language contact in the development of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Case studies in language change pp. Present state and future prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology , 20 , — System and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction. Genetic connections among the Altaic languages. Investigations into the prehistory of languages pp. Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross pp. Linguistic phylogenies support back-migration from Beringia to Asia. PoS ONE , 9 3 , e Classifying the Austroasiatic languages: History and state of the art.

Diachronica , 22 2 , — Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages Vols. In Ding Bangxin Ed. Summary report of the Altaic panel. A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska , new ser. A response to Campbell. Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the Greater Himalayan region, containing an introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language Vols.

The diversity of the Tibeto-Burman language family and the linguistic ancestry of Chinese. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics , 1 2 , — On the genetic position of the Bai language. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale , 34 1 , — The Papuan languages of Oceania. Introduction to Chinese dialectology.

The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar. Classification and the comparative method. Their nature and development. The Papuan languages of New Guinea. The languages of New Guinea. Annual Review of Anthropology , 29 , — The Paman group of the Pama-Nyungan phylic family. Discourse and grammar in Australian languages. Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages. Cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples pp. Papuan languages of Oceania. Languages of the Middle Andes in areal-typological perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran.

A comprehensive guide pp. Grammatical convergence and the genesis of diversity in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund. Anthropological Linguistics , 42 2 , — Review of the book Language in the Americas , by J. Language , 64 , —

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