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Diversity of the linguistic world. The problem of language classification

According to one of the stories in the Bible, people on Earth once spoke the same language. However, God punished them for their pride, and during the construction of the famous Tower of Babel, a language barrier arose between people - they ceased to understand each other, and the construction remained unfinished, and the builders themselves scattered all over the world.

This is how peoples and nations speaking different languages were formed. This is a legend. But, be that as it may, there are a great many languages that people now speak, and many of them may seem not only complex, but even strange and funny to representatives of other nationalities. What can I say, often the population of two nearby villages (as, for example, in Africa) are not able to understand each other. And the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea alone speak 500 languages! The reason for such “linguistic” abundance among the Guineans is the mountainous landscape, because it is the mountains that separate one valley from another, and their populations rarely contact each other.

Alphabets also have global differences. For example, our native Russian language has 33 letters, the Khmer alphabet has 72 letters, Hawaiian has 12, and the inhabitants of the island of Bougainville get by with 11 letters.

There are differences between languages in terms of difficulty. For example, the Tabasaran language (Dagestan) is considered the most difficult. Anyone who decides to study it will have to learn 48 cases, and this is not counting other difficulties. But the easiest language to learn is the one spoken by the population of the Hawaiian Islands. It contains only 7 consonants and 5 vowels, and the Hawaiian aborigines did not have an alphabet as such at all, and it had to be compiled by missionaries who came to educate the local natives. The smallest vocabulary is in the Taki language (French Guinea), it has only 340 words.

Sometimes the transfer of information can be carried out in a far from “traditional” way, for example, using drums. This type of “communication” is practiced in Central and South America, Asia and Africa. It is convenient because the signals transmitted by the drums play the role of a kind of “telephone”, allowing people to transmit news from village to village.

Hunters who track animals at night have to be extremely careful so as not to scare away their prey with excessive noise. Therefore, the Pygmies and the Vedas of Ceylon use a special monotonous whispering language when hunting. In its sound, this “whispering” is similar to the noise produced by the joint breathing of a pack of dogs.

One of the most interesting languages is silbo-gomero. This is a whistle that is still used by the people of the Canary Islands to this day. According to legend, this is how runaway African slaves communicated with each other. Silbo-gomero is important for the islanders because this whistle can be used to communicate over long distances. And although telephones on the island are no longer a curiosity, communication in some places is still unavailable, so you have to transmit information to neighbors using a whistle. By the way, the information transmitted in this way is quite detailed. The Canarians cherish their heritage, and therefore silbo-gomero is included in the list of subjects required to be studied in primary schools.

Another type of communication method is sign language, which is used by people with hearing impairments. However, even within it there is such a variety of forms that we had to resort to creating a kind of “gestural Esperanto” in which people of different nationalities can communicate. In a number of countries, which include Spain, Iceland and the Czech Republic, sign language is recognized by the constitution.

Many languages have a number of features due to external environment. For example, the Eskimos do not have general concept“snow”, but they have more than 20 words denoting the same phenomenon, but in more detail. For example, an Eskimo will say “blizzard”, “drifting snow”, “groats” depending on the type of snow precipitation. In the same way, an Australian will not understand if he is asked to count how many trees, animals and birds he sees; he will specifically name the type of animal or species of tree. For example, if an Australian sees five cockatoos and three ostriches, he will not say “eight birds,” for the Australian aborigines this is too abstract a concept.

Representatives of the Pirkhan tribe do not have specific names for numbers in their language. They can say “a little (one)”, “a little more” and there is also a definition for a group of objects of more than three objects. And it's all. Once upon a time, the Pirkhans had no need for numerals, but nowadays, because of this, they have to face difficulties when communicating with other tribes. However, the attempts of a couple of Europeans who lived for a long time in the Pirkhan tribe to teach them numerals and simple arithmetic operations did not bring success.

As you can see, there are a great many languages around the globe, and some of them are quite original. However, despite their abundance, only six languages have received official UN recognition: English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, English and Arabic.

Description of the presentation by individual slides:

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The variety of languages of the world and their classifications. Functional (social) typology of languages Russian language teacher Faizrakhmanova I.V. 2017

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Classification of languages is the distribution of the languages of the world into groups based on certain characteristics, in accordance with the principles underlying the study.

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Classifications of languages V.I. Kodukhov - genealogical - typological - functional - areal A.A. Reformatsky genealogical typological T.I. Vendina genealogical typological geographical functional cultural-historical

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Genealogical classification The goal is to determine the place of a particular language in the circle of related languages, to establish its genetic connections. The main research method is comparative historical. The main classification categories are family, branch, group of languages.

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Basic principles of genealogical classification The principle of the “family tree” - each family of languages comes from dialects of the parent language that diverged from each other; proto-language – the language that is the basis of the historical community of related languages; within one family of languages, “branches of languages” are distinguished; branches of languages are divided into smaller groups. “Theory of waves” (I. Schmidt) the importance of geographical contiguity of languages; each new phenomenon has its own source and spreads in damped waves; we should not talk about intermediate proto-languages, but about a continuous network of transitions from one language to another.

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The general picture of the genealogical classification of languages, which continues to be refined, is as follows: Indo-European family of languages. Includes more than ten groups (“branches”) of languages, among which both living and dead languages are represented: Hittite-Luwian or Anatolian group; Indian or Indo-Aryan group; Iranian group; Tocharian group; Illyrian group; Greek group; Italian group; Celtic group; German troupe; Baltic group; Slavic group.

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Uralic family of languages. Includes two groups: Finno-Ugric: a) Baltic-Finnish languages: Finnish, Izhorian, Karelian, Vepsian, forming the northern group, and Estonian, Livonian, Votic languages, forming the southern group; b) Volga languages: Mari and Mordovian languages (Erzya and Moksha); c) Permian: Udmurt, Komi-Zyryan, Komi-Permyak languages d) Ugric: Hungarian, Khanty, Mansi languages; e) Sami; 2) Samoyed group: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan and the almost extinct Selkup (south Krasnoyarsk Territory) languages;

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Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic) family: 1) Semitic languages: a) northeastern, which includes the dead Akkadian language b) northwestern, which includes dead Ugaritic, Eblaitic, Amorite, Hebrew (or Canaanite), Phoenician-Punic and Aramaic, as well as living Hebrew and Assyrian; c) central, which includes Arabic with many dialects and Maltese; d) southern, including the unwritten languages Mehri, Shahri and Soqotri, as well as Jibbali, Tigrai, Amharic, Harari and the dead languages Minaan, Sabaean, Kataban, Ethiopian, Gafat; 2) Egyptian languages: dead since the 5th century. Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Arabic. 3) Berber-Libyan (numerous languages and dialects of the Berber peoples of North Africa and the Sahara); 4) Chadian (the largest of them is Hausa); 5) Cushitic: Somali and Oromo;

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Caucasian languages, uniting three families of languages: 1) the Western Caucasian family: Abkhazian, Abaza, Adyghe, Kabardino-Circassian and Ubykh languages; 2) the East Caucasian family, which falls into five groups: a) Nakh (Chechen, Ingush and Batsbi languages in Georgia); b) Avar (Avar, Andean, Tsez); c) Lak (Lak language in Dagestan); d) Dargin (Dargin language in Dagestan); e) Lezgin (Lezgin and Tabasaran languages); 3) South Caucasian (Kartvelian) family: Georgian, Zan with Chan and Mingrelian dialects, Laz, Svan languages.

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Dravidian family of languages. It includes the languages Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malaya Lam, etc. The Yukaghir-Chuvan family of languages. The only representative of this family of languages is the Yukaghir language in the Kolyma and Alazeya river basins. The Kolyma and Tundra dialects have also been preserved. The Altai family is a macrofamily of languages that unites, on the basis of supposed genetic belonging: 1) the Turkic group: Chuvash, Tatar, Bashkir, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kumyk, Karachay-Balkar, Crimean Tatar, Karaite, Nogai, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Yakut, Dolgan, Altai, Khakass, Tuvan, Tofalar, Shor, Chulym, Kamasin, Uyghur, Turkmen, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Gagauz, as well as dead Bugar, Pecheneg, Polovtsian, Khazar, etc.; 2) Mongolian group: Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk, Dagur, Mogolian, Duneyan and other languages; 3) Tungus-Manchu group: Evenki, Udege, Nanai, Manchu, etc.

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Chukchi-Kamchatka family of languages (spoken by indigenous people Chukotka and Kamchatka), uniting Chukotka, Koryak, Alyutor, Itelmen and other languages. The Yenisei family of languages (distributed along the banks of the Yenisei and its tributaries), including the living Ket and Sym languages, as well as the dead Kott, Aryan, and Assan languages. The Sino-Tibetan family of languages Traditionally, there are two branches: 1) eastern, uniting the Chinese and Dungan languages; sometimes the Karen languages spoken on the border of Thailand and Burma are included in this group; 2) Western (Tibeto-Burman languages: Tibetan, Newari, Tripuri, Manipuri, Nizo, Kachin, Burmese).

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The Austroasiatic family, which includes eight language groups, each of which is represented by numerous dialects. On the Andaman Islands, linguists have recorded a genetically isolated Andamanese language, the genealogical roots of which are being studied. The Austronesian family of languages of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, which includes four groups of languages: 1) Indonesian (including more than three hundred languages, including Indonesian, Filipino, Tagalog, Malagasy, Malay-Javanese languages, etc.); 2) Polynesian (Tongan, Maori, Samoan, Tahitian, Hawaiian and Nuclear Polynesian languages); 3) Melanesian (uniting more than four hundred languages: the languages of Fiji, Rotuma, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia); 4) Micronesian (languages Nauru, Kiribati, Ponape, Marshallese, etc.). The Papuan family unites about a thousand numerous and genealogically heterogeneous languages of New Guinea and the nearby islands of the Pacific Ocean.

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Typological classification The goal is to group languages into large classes based on the similarity of their grammatical structure, to determine the place of a particular language, taking into account the formal organization of its linguistic structure. The main research method is comparative. The main classification categories are type, class of languages.

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The most famous of the typological classifications is the morphological classification of languages. According to this classification, the languages of the world are divided into three main types: 1) isolating (or amorphous) languages: - absence of inflectional forms and, accordingly, formative affixes; - the word in them is “equal to the root”, therefore such languages are sometimes called root languages; - the connection between words is less grammatical, but the order of words and their semantics are grammatically significant; - words devoid of affixal morphemes are, as it were, isolated from each other as part of a statement, therefore these languages are called isolating; - in the syntactic structure of the sentences of such languages, word order is extremely important;

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2) affixing languages, in the grammatical structure of which affixes play an important role. In affixing languages there are: a) inflectional languages - these are languages that are characterized by the polyfunctionality of affixing morphemes; - the presence of a fusion phenomenon, i.e. interpenetration of morphemes, in which drawing a boundary between root and affix becomes impossible; - “internal inflection”, indicating the grammatical form of the word; - a large number of phonetically and semantically unmotivated types of declension and conjugation. b) agglutinative languages are languages that are a kind of antipode to inflectional languages. - they have no internal inflection; - there is no fusion, so morphemes are easily identified within words; - formatives convey one grammatical meaning; - in each part of speech there is only one type of inflection; - a developed system of inflectional and word-formative affixation; - a single type of declension and conjugation.

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3) incorporating (or polysynthetic) languages: - incompleteness of the morphological structure of the word; - the word “acquires structure” only as part of a sentence, i.e. here there is a special relationship between word and sentence: outside the sentence there is no word in our understanding, sentences constitute the basic unit of speech, into which words are “included”;

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Functional (social) classification. In the sociolinguistic “questionnaire” of languages, it is advisable to take into account the following features: 1) the communicative rank of the language, corresponding to the volume and functional diversity of communication in a particular language; 2) the presence of a written tradition; 3) the degree of standardization (normalization) of the language; presence and nature of codification; type of standardized (literary) language; its relationship with non-standardized forms of language existence (dialects, vernacular, etc.); 4) the legal status of the language (“state”, “official”, “constitutional”, “titular”, etc.) and its actual position in multilingual conditions; 5) confessional status of the language; 6) educational and pedagogical status of the language: language as an academic subject; as a language of teaching; as a “foreign” or “classical” language, etc.

Lecture on the topic

"DIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD"

Earth population 7 billion people

Number of languages 2.5-5 thousand (up to 6-7 thousand)

One day, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published the data at its disposal: there are 2,796 languages in the world. Typically, linguists prefer to give approximate numbers. The reasons for the discrepancies are as follows.

1) The difficulty of distinguishing between language and dialect.

2) Insufficient knowledge of languages. We live in a world where, it would seem, everything is already open and mapped. However, from time to time it becomes known from newspapers or television programs that somewhere in the jungles of the Amazonian lowland or New Guinea, modern travelers managed to discover a tiny lost tribe, alienated from contacts with other people and speaking a language not known to any of the specialists.

3) N Finally, languages can die. In Russia, for example, the Kerek language in Kamchatka has literally died out before our eyes, and the languages of such peoples as the Itelmens, Yukaghirs, and Tofalars are disappearing. These are tiny peoples, only a few hundred people each, many of whom, especially young people, no longer know their language... Only in the 20th century, dozens of languages disappeared from the face of the earth.With the development of communications, the number living languages shrinks at an average rate of 1 tongue per two weeks.

So it is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish the exact number of languages in the world.

Most common languages (by number of speakers):

Chinese

As of January 2012 1349718000 people, Mandarin is spoken by more than 885 million people.

English, Spanish, Hindi (fighting for second place)

English is the national language not only of the British and Americans, but also of Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders... It is one of the official languages of India and 15 African states (former British colonies); it is also spoken in other countries.

English is an international language. One and a half billion people around the world speak this language. It is native to 400-500 million people in 12 countries, and over a billion use English as a second language.

English is the language of business and politics. It is one of the working languages of the United Nations. World information technologies also based on English. More than 90% of all information in the world is also stored in English. This language is defined as the main language of the Internet. Television and radio broadcasts of the world's largest companies (CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, CBC), covering an audience of 500 million people, are also performed in English. More than 70% of scientific publications are published in English. They sing in this language songs and films.

Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, French, etc.

Language map of the world (toart of world languages)

this is a map of families and groups of languages, as well as their individual representatives. The distribution area of languages is indicated by a certain color.

Less common languages

CurrentlyThere are just over 400 languages that are considered endangered.They are spoken by a very small number of mostly elderly people and, apparently, these languages will disappear forever from the face of the Earth with the death of these “last of the Mohicans.” Here are some examples:

Russia: Kerek (2 people) and Udege (100 people) languages;

Africa: languages Bikia (1 person), Elmolo (8 people), Goundo (30 people), Kambap (30 people);

Australia: Alaua language (about 20 people);

North America: languages Chinook (12 people), Kansa (19 people), Kaguila (35 people);

South America: Tehulche languages (about 30 people), Itonama (about 100 people).

In 1996, a man named Red Thundercloud died in the United States... He was the last person who knew the Catawba language of the Sioux Indian tribe. True, before his death he managed to record speech patterns and ritual songs of his language for the Smithsonian Institution, which rendered a great service to science. Unfortunately, this rarely happens; more often than not, a language dies quietly and imperceptibly along with its last speakers...

Every two weeks, somewhere in the world, a language dies along with its last speaker, and with it a picture of the hopes, beliefs and views of an entire ethnic group. The loss of each language, therefore, always means the loss of the culture of its native people. These languages cannot leave behind even exhibits for a museum, since most of them do not have written traditions. So with the death of their last speaker, the language disappears without a trace and forever.Languages die along with the last speaker, and therefore danger threatens, first of all, nations that do not use writing.

According to scientists, in 50-100 years half of the existing languages will disappear. In order for a language to be preserved, about 100 thousand of its speakers are required.

In 2009 UNESCO has recognized 136 languages in Russia as endangered.

Languages always die. As a result of wars, natural disasters, epidemics, the enslavement of one people by another, but never before has extinction proceeded at such a rapid pace. It is estimated that over the past 500 years, humanity has lost approximately half of all the languages it spoke, and half of all remaining languages will disappear before the end of this century. There are many reasons leading to the death of a language, but the main ones currently playing a decisive role can probably be called economic and political factors: globalization, modernization, industrialization and urbanization, entailing the transformation of a world that once consisted of a motley collection of relatively self-sufficient individuals. peoples into one “global village”.

As a rule, “strong” languages, such as, say, English, Russian, French, Arabic or Chinese, all without exception with a large number of speakers and a developed written tradition, have been studied quite well by linguists. This is opposed by thousands of practically unstudied and rapidly disappearing languages, which makes the question of their study and description one of the most pressing and pressing problems of modern linguistics.

Many languages are disappearing due to the fact that their speakers come into contact with a stronger linguistic environment, so the languages of small nationalities and the languages of peoples without statehood are primarily at risk of extinction. If less than 70% of children learn a language, it is considered endangered. According to the Atlas of the World's Endangered Languages UNESCO , currently in Europe About 50 languages are threatened with extinction.

Scientists and politicians have long sounded the alarm. The UN declared 1994-2004 the decade of the world's indigenous peoples, and UNESCO and the Council of Europe tasked scientists with creating the Red Book, a global database and atlases of endangered languages.

So, languages are divided into

1) alive;

2) dead, for example:

Latin (the language of the Roman Empire - the political basis of Western European civilization, the language catholic church, the main language of scientific terminology of mankind);

from Taroslavian ( literary, religious and political language of the Slavs and their neighbors (Lithuanians, Moldavians, Finno-Ugric peoples) from the Adriatic and Baltic to the Urals);

Sanskrit ( divine alive and developing language Indian culture and one of the languages of Buddhist culture).

Another interesting example Ubykh language. The original zone of distribution of the Ubykh language Black Sea coast Caucasus , currently the region Lazarevsky, Central and Khostinsky district city of Sochi . In the 1860s after graduationCaucasian WarThe Ubykhs were evicted by the Russian government in Turkey , the remaining part mixed with the local population, as a result of which the language lost its natural distribution area. The last known speaker of the Ubykh language Tevfik Esenç died in 1992 in Turkey . The Ubykh language is known for its unique phonetics - it has 84 consonant sounds (of which four were used only in borrowed words) and only two vowels (“a” long and “a” short).

Languages are also divided into

1) natural in linguistics and philosophy of language language and used for communication between people (as opposed to formal languages and other types of sign systems , also called languages in semiotics ) and not artificially created (unlikeartificial languages).

2) artificial -special languages, which, unlike natural , are purposefully designed.Diversity of languages has always prevented peoples from communicating with each other, so people dreamed of a language understandable to everyone.

The following types of artificial languages are distinguished:

Programming languages And computer languageslanguages for automatic information processing using COMPUTER.
Information languageslanguages used in various information processing systems.
Formalized languages Sciences languages intended for symbolic notation scientific facts and theories of mathematics, logic, chemistry and other sciences.
Languages of non-existent peoples created infictionalor entertainment purposes, for example: Elvish language, invented by J. Tolkien, Klingon language, created by Marc Okrand for a fantasy series"Star Trek" (see Fictional languages), Na'vi language , created for the film " Avatar."
International auxiliary languageslanguages created from elements of natural languages and offered as an auxiliary means of interethnic communication.

Esperanto the most famous and widespread of artificially created languages. This language was created by Warsaw physician and linguist Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887. The word “Esperanto” (“esperanto” hopeful) was originally the pseudonym under which Zamenhof published his works.

Esperanto is based on international words borrowed from Latin and Greek, and 16 grammatical rules with no exceptions. This language has no grammatical gender, it has only two cases - nominative and accusative, and the meanings of the rest are conveyed using prepositions. The alphabet is based on Latin, and all parts of speech have fixed endings: -o for nouns, -a for adjectives, etc. All this makes Esperanto such a simple language that an untrained person can become fluent enough to speak it in a few months of regular practice. In order to learn at the same level any of the naturallanguages, it takes at least several years.

Currently, Esperanto is actively used, according to various estimates, from several tens of thousands to several million people. At the same time, it is believed that for ~500-1000 people this language is native, that is, studied from the moment of birth. Usually these are children from marriages where the parents belong to different nations and use Esperanto for intra-family communication.

Conducted in Esperanto world congresses, newspapers and magazines are published, and radio stations broadcast their own programs. Esperanto is one of the most widely spoken languages on the Internet.

Among the artificial languages, the most famous are also Basic English, Volapuk, Interlingua etc. There are also languages that were specifically developed to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence, for example, linkos.

Languages:

Monofunctional

2) Multifunctional

Today there are seven languages that are "world languages". These are English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, French, German, Portuguese. Each of these languages is widespread in the territories of several states, which has its own historical reasons. For these reasons, a fairly large number of people speak these languages. Languages such as Chinese , Hindi and Urdu are also among the most important languages of the world, but are less popular in the international arena.

6 official languagesUnited Nations:

English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic (“memo” AFRICA).

All major UN documents, including resolutions, are published in official languages.

Polyglot (from Greek. πολυ-, “many” and γλώττα, “language”) a person who speaks many languages

The greatest polyglots in history are the Italian cardinals.Giuseppe Mezzofanti(1774-1849), who spoke 27 (according to other sources 38) languages, as well as a Danish professor Rask (1787-1832), Englishman John Bowring (1792-1872) and Dr Harold Williams from New Zealand (1876-1928), who spoke 28 languages each.

In our time, the most outstanding polyglot is recognized George Schmidt , worked at the UN. The bibliographic reference book of this organization noted that Schmidt spoke “only” 19 languages and, due to lack of time, could not activate another 12 languages.

1.Languages living and dead. Artificial languages.

2.Prospects for the linguistic development of mankind. Language contacts.

3. The concept of bilingualism and diglossia.

4.The concept of language policy. Current problems of language policy at the present stage.

Internal language issues become more complicated in those countries where there are national minorities, and in those multinational states where a number of nations unite.

In multinational states, the dominant nation imposes a language on national minorities through the press, school and administrative measures, limiting the scope of use of other national languages only to everyday communication. This phenomenon is called great-power chauvinism (for example, the dominance of the German language, which existed in the “patchwork” national composition of Austria-Hungary; the Turkization of the Balkan peoples; the forced Russification of small nationalities in Tsarist Russia, etc.). National liberation movements in the era of capitalism are always associated with the restoration of the rights and powers of the national languages of insurgent peoples (the struggle for national languages against the hegemony of the German language in Italy, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia in the 19th century).

In the colonies, as a rule, the colonialists introduced their language as the state language, reducing native languages to colloquial speech ( English language in South Africa, India, not to mention Canada, Australia, New Zealand; French in West and North-West Africa and Indochina, etc.).

However, often linguistic relations between the colonizers and the natives develop differently, which is caused by the practical needs of communication. Already the first great journeys of the 15th–16th centuries. introduced Europeans to many new peoples and languages of Asia, Africa, America and Australia. These languages became the subject of study and collection in dictionaries (these are the famous “language catalogs” of the 18th century).

For more productive exploitation of the colonies and the colonial population, it was necessary to communicate with the natives and influence them through missionaries and commission agents. Therefore, along with the study of exotic languages and the compilation of grammars for them, it is necessary to find some kind of language common to Europeans and natives. Sometimes such a language is the most developed local language, especially if some kind of writing is adapted to it. This is, for example, the Hausa language in Equatorial Africa, or this was once the Kumyk language in Dagestan. Sometimes this is a mixture of native and European vocabulary, such as “petit negre” in the French colonies in Africa or “broken English” in Sierra Leone

(Gulf of Guinea in Africa). Pacific port slang is beach-la-mar in Polynesia and pidgin English in Chinese ports. “Pidgin English” is based on English vocabulary, but distorted (for example, pidgin – “deed” from business; nusi-papa – “letter”, “book” from news-paper); meanings can also change: mary – “in general” woman" (in English - given name“Mary”), pigeon – “generally a bird” (in English “dove”) – and Chinese grammar.

The same type of speech in the border Russian-Chinese regions is “mine according to yours,” that is, broken Russian in the way the Chinese speak Russian.

Sabir, used in Mediterranean ports, belongs to the same type of “international languages” - it is a mixture of French, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Arabic.

However, in higher spheres of international communication this type of mixed speech is not used.

In international diplomacy in different eras different languages are used - in the medieval era: in Europe - Latin, in the countries of the East - mainly Arabic; V new history The French language played a big role. Recently, this issue is no longer resolved unambiguously, since five languages are officially accepted at the UN: Russian, English, French, Spanish and Chinese.

The preference for certain languages in these cases is associated with the prestige of the language, which arises not from its linguistic qualities, but from its historical and cultural fate.

Finally, international jargons are caused by the even more real needs of communication between multilingual people in border areas or in places where a multinational population gathers, for example in seaports. Here, as we have seen, elements of any two languages most often interact (French and African, English and Chinese, Russian and Norwegian, etc.), although there is also a more complex mixture (“sabir”).

In scientific practice, Latin (and in the countries of the East - Arabic) remained for a very long time as a common language, enriched by the experience of the Renaissance and supported by the authority of Descartes, Leibniz, Bacon and others. Back in the first half of the 19th century. There are often cases when scientific works and dissertations were written in Latin (for example, the first work on Slavic studies by the Czech Joseph Dobrovsky “Institutiones linguae slavicae dialecti veteris” - “Fundamentals of the Slavic language of the ancient dialect”, 1822; the famous dissertation on non-Euclidean geometry by the Russian mathematician Lobachevsky was also written in Latin; Latin nomenclature in botany, zoology, medicine and pharmacology is still international and is used in the practice of all European nations).

In the practice of diplomacy and politics since the end of the 18th century. The French language prevailed, which in the first half of the 19th century. played the role of a world language, however, the rapid growth of English colonial expansion and the importance of English politics on a global scale came to light in the second half of the 19th century. English comes first. In the 20th century also applied for this role German through commercial and technical advances Germany.

Along with this, the ideal of an international language has long been ripening in the minds of scientists and inventors.

The first to speak out in favor of creating a rational artificial language that would be able to express the provisions of any modern scientific or philosophical system were back in the 17th century. Descartes and Leibniz.

However, the implementation of these plans dates back to the end of the 19th century, when artificial languages were invented: Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, etc.

In 1880, the German Catholic Father Schleyer published a draft of the Volapuk language (vol-a - “world-a” and puk - “language”, i.e. “world language”).

In 1887, a draft of the Esperanto language appeared in Warsaw, compiled by the doctor L. Zamenhof. Esperanto means “hoping” (participle of the verb esperi).

Very quickly Esperanto gained success in many countries, firstly, among collectors (especially philatelists), athletes, even businessmen, as well as among some philologists and philosophers; Esperanto appeared not only teaching aids about Esperanto, but also a variety of literature, including fiction, both translated and original; this latter is hardly worth supporting, since with all the success Esperanto and similar languages always remain secondary and “business”, that is, existing outside of stylistics. Esperanto has always been used as an auxiliary, secondary, experimental “language” in a relatively narrow environment. Therefore, its sphere is purely practical; this is precisely an “auxiliary language”, an “intermediary language”, and even then in the conditions of Western languages, which is alien to Eastern languages. Other auxiliary international languages (Ajuwanto, Ido) were not at all successful.

All such “laboratory inventions” can only be successful in a certain practical area, without pretending to be a language in the full sense of the word. Such “auxiliary means of communication” are deprived of the main qualities of a real language: a nationwide basis and living development, which cannot be replaced by an orientation towards international terminology and the convenience of word formation and sentence construction.

A true international language can only be formed historically on the basis of real national languages.

As already mentioned, the languages of the world are currently going through various stages historical development due to the different social conditions in which the speakers of these languages find themselves.

Along with the tribal languages of small nationalities (Africa, Polynesia), there are languages of nationalities in national minorities(Wales and Scots in England, Breton and Provençal in France).

In the development of languages, two opposing processes are observed - divergence(the breakdown of a single language into two or more related languages that differ from each other) and convergence(approach different languages, which can form a linguistic union, or form a single, mutual language).

Language Union - uh then a historically (and not genetically) established community of languages. The most typical examples are the Western European and Balkan language unions, as well as the Volga language union.

The development of languages is influenced by internal and external linguistic factors. TO internal factors include simplification phonetic system and grammatical structures, and external factors associated with the influence of other languages.

Substrate- a language that has been supplanted by another language, but traces

the repressed language is preserved in the alien language. Superstrat- layering of alien features of another language or an alien language onto the original basis of the local language. Adstrat- mastering some features of another language, subject to territorial proximity. Interstrat- interaction of neighboring languages. Koine- a common language based on a mixture of related languages or dialects. Lingua franca- an oral means of interethnic communication that does not displace other languages from everyday life, but coexists with them on the same territory. Pidgin- an auxiliary trade language in former colonial countries. Pidgin is a lingua franca that is not native to anyone. It is a means of communication between the natives and each other. Creole languages - these are pidgins that became the first native languages for a certain nationality.

Bilingualism - bilingualism, proficiency and alternate use by the same person or group of two different languages or different dialects of the same language. Mass bilingualism arises historically as a result of conquests, peaceful migrations of peoples and contacts between neighboring multilingual groups. Types of bilingualism: subordinate (subordination: knows one language large quantity people than the other); coordinated (same language proficiency); individual; National; active; passive. Diglossia- the simultaneous existence in society of two languages or two forms of one language, but unlike bilingualism, one of these languages or forms is considered more prestigious.

TO dead languages include languages that have only the meaning of an educational tool and subject scientific research: 1) classical languages, preserved only in written monuments and reaching us as a subject of education; 2) decipherable languages, preserved in written monuments, the texts of which were forgotten, like the languages themselves; 3) reconstructed languages, pre-literate oral languages that have not survived, restored in their main parts by linguistic science. TO living languages include native languages, i.e. mastered in the family before school and accepted by a given ethnic group as a characteristic of its current state, and foreign, i.e. languages studied in preschool and school and adopted as native languages by another ethnic group.

International languages serve as a means of communication between peoples of different states. There are two types of international languages: for natural languages the function of the international language is secondary, for artificial languages it is primary.

In ancient times and the Middle Ages, international languages had limits of distribution: 1. Specific region(in the Middle East - Sumerian, Akkadian, Aramaic, in the Hellenistic states - ancient Greek); 2. Specific social group(priests and priests used international languages for religious purposes (Arabic in Islamic countries, Latin and Greek in Christian countries); 3. Specific function(in the Far East, the Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese had Chinese as their written international language in hieroglyphic form).

Artificial international languages are divided into a priori and a posteriori. A priori artificial language - the vocabulary and grammar of which are not borrowed from natural languages, but are constructed according to their own rules. A posteriori artificial language - words are borrowed from natural languages, and the grammar is modeled after natural languages, for example, Basic English. A mixed artificial language combines the properties of a priori and a posteriori languages. In Volapuk and Esperanto, the modified vocabulary is from natural languages, and the grammar is a priori. There are also specialized artificial languages of mathematics, chemistry, logic, and programming. The latter include, for example, languages such as FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC.

Since language is the most important feature of a nation, then, naturally, national policy primarily concerns languages and their development. The development of language is associated with the establishment of a literary language, which is associated with the creation of writing. During the existence of the USSR, about 60 languages received written language, and thus the opportunity to study at school in their native language.

On the way to establishing and normalizing the languages of the peoples of the USSR, many difficulties were encountered, the main one being the choice of the dialect on the basis of which the literary language should be fixed. There are cases when two dialects, greatly diverged, have equal rights and then two parallel literary languages arise (for example, Erzya-Mordovian and Moksha-Mordovian). A significant difficulty is the striped population, when a nationality with a small number of speakers is scattered over a large territory interspersed with the population of other nationalities (for example, the Khanty in Western Siberia or the Evenki in Eastern Siberia). Favorable conditions to stabilize the literary language, it represents the presence of some kind of writing in the past, even if it was not of a national character (for example, the Arabic writing of the Tatars, Uzbeks, Tajiks).

The Russian language, the language of international communication between nations and nationalities, played an important role for the peoples of the former USSR.

The Russian language remains the main source of enriching the vocabulary of most national languages, especially in the field of political, scientific and technical terminology.

At the same time, in the language policy of the central party and state bodies, starting from the 30s, the tendency towards Russification of the entire geopolitical space of the USSR became increasingly stronger - in full accordance with the strengthening of its economic centralization. In light of this trend, positive developments in the spread of writing acquired a negative connotation due to the almost forced introduction of an alphabet on a Russian basis; the Russian language was given clear preference everywhere.

Orientation domestic policy on the formation of an ethnically impersonal, supposedly united “Soviet people” had two important consequences for the linguistic life of the country.

Firstly, such a policy accelerated the process of degradation of the languages of many small nations (the so-called “minority languages”). This process is global in nature and has objective reasons, among which the language policy of the state is not the least important. In sociolinguistics, there is the concept of “sick languages” - these are languages that are losing their significance as a means of communication. Preserved only by the older representatives of a given people, they gradually move into the category of endangered languages. The number of speakers of such languages amounts to hundreds, or even dozens of people, and, for example, in the Kerek language (Chukchi Autonomous Okrug) in 1991 only three people spoke.

Secondly, the centralization policy gave rise to an increasingly stronger cultural-national confrontation between the republics and the center, and during the years of perestroika this resulted in a massive and rapid process of revision of the Constitutions of the union republics in terms of the state language. Beginning in 1988 in the Lithuanian SSR, this process during 1989 and the first half of the 1990s. covered the entire USSR, and after its collapse a new wave of clarification of the Constitutions of national subjects began Russian Federation by introducing an article on state languages, which recognized national languages along with Russian. By the end of 1995, in all national republics within the Russian Federation, a law on languages was either adopted or submitted for discussion.

The language reform ongoing in the Russian Federation does not end with the adoption of laws on languages. It is necessary to provide for the entire range of measures for cultural and linguistic construction and ensure the preservation of those peoples and languages that can still be preserved. And one of the primary tasks of Russian linguists is to record endangered languages for posterity in the form of dictionaries, texts, grammatical essays, tape recordings of live speech and folklore, because every language, even the smallest one, is a unique phenomenon of the multinational culture of Russia.

Questions for self-control:

1. What internal and external linguistic factors influence the development of languages?

2. What is language policy?

3. Define language community.

4. Define the “language situation”.

5. What is "pidgin"?

6. Define bilingualism. What type is it?

7. What languages are called “dead”? What dead languages do you know? What does studying them give?

8. What is the function of international languages? What two types of international languages exist?

Earth population – 7 billion people

Number of languages – 2.5-5 thousand (up to 6-7 thousand)

1) The difficulty of distinguishing between language and dialect.

2) Insufficient knowledge of languages. We live in a world where, it would seem, everything is already open and mapped. However, from time to time it becomes known from newspapers or television programs that somewhere in the jungles of the Amazonian lowlands or New Guinea, modern travelers managed to discover a tiny lost tribe, alienated from contact with other people and speaking a language not known to any of the specialists.

3) Finally, languages can die. In Russia, for example, the Kerek language in Kamchatka has literally died out before our eyes, and the languages of such peoples as the Itelmens, Yukaghirs, and Tofalars are disappearing. These are tiny peoples, only a few hundred people each, many of whom, especially young people, no longer know their language... Only in the 20th century, dozens of languages disappeared from the face of the earth. With the development of communications, the number of living languages is declining at an average rate of 1 language per two weeks.

So it is very difficult, if not impossible, to establish the exact number of languages in the world.

Most common languages (by number of speakers):

Chinese

As of January 2012 - 1349718000 people, more than 885 million people speak Mandarin.

English, Spanish, Hindi (fighting for second place)

English is the language of business and politics. It is one of the working languages of the United Nations. The world of information technology is also based on English. More than 90% of all information in the world is also stored in English. This language is defined as the main language of the Internet. Television and radio broadcasts of the world's largest companies (CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, CBC), covering an audience of 500 million people, are also performed in English. More than 70% of scientific publications are published in English. Songs are sung and films are made in this language.

Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, French, etc.

Language map of the world (toart of world languages)

is a map of families and groups of languages, as well as their individual representatives. The distribution area of languages is indicated by a certain color.

Less common languages

There are currently just over 400 languages considered endangered. They are spoken by a very small number of mostly elderly people and, apparently, these languages will disappear forever from the face of the Earth with the death of these “last of the Mohicans.” Here are some examples:

Russia: Kerek (2 people) and Udege (100 people) languages;

Africa: languages Bikia (1 person), Elmolo (8 people), Goundo (30 people), Kambap (30 people);

Australia: Alaua language (about 20 people);

North America: Chinook (12 people), Kansa (19 people), Kaguila (35 people);

South America: Tehulche languages (about 30 people), Itonama (about 100 people).

Every two weeks, somewhere in the world, a language dies along with its last speaker, and with it a picture of the hopes, beliefs and views of an entire ethnic group. The loss of each language, therefore, always means the loss of the culture of its native people. These languages cannot leave behind even exhibits for a museum, since most of them do not have written traditions. So with the death of their last speaker, the language disappears without a trace and forever. Languages die along with the last speaker, and therefore danger threatens, first of all, nations that do not use writing.

According to scientists, in 50-100 years half of the existing languages will disappear. In order for a language to be preserved, about 100 thousand of its speakers are required.

In 2009, UNESCO recognized 136 languages in Russia as endangered.

Many languages are disappearing due to the fact that their speakers come into contact with a stronger linguistic environment, so the languages of small nationalities and the languages of peoples without statehood are primarily at risk of extinction. If less than 70% of children learn a language, it is considered endangered. According to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, approximately 50 languages are currently at risk of extinction in Europe.

So, languages are divided into