Portal:Language
Introduction
A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico (c. 2nd century) depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his mouth, symbolizing speech
Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; a language is any specific example of such a system.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.
Selected general articles
The Shor language (Шор тили) is a Turkic language spoken by about 2,800 people in a region called Mountain Shoriya, in the Kemerovo Province in southwest Siberia, although the entire Shor population in this area is over 12000 people. Presently, not all ethnic Shors speak Shor, and the language suffered a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. During this period the Shor language was neither written nor taught in schools. However, since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a Shor language revival. The language is now taught at the Novokuznetsk branch of the Kemerovo State University.
Like its neighbor languages, Shor has borrowed many roots from Mongolian, as well as words from Russian. The two main dialects are Mrassu and Kondoma, named after the rivers in whose valleys they are spoken. From the point of view of classification of Turkic languages, these dialects belong to different branches of Turkic: According to the reflexes of the Proto-Turkic (PT) intervocalic -d- in modern languages (compare PT *adak, in modern Turkic languages meaning 'foot' or 'leg'), the Mrassu dialect is a -z- variety: azak, the Kondoma dialect is a -y- variety: ayak. This feature normally distinguishes different branches of Turkic which means that the Shor language has formed from different Turkic sources. Read more...
The Kru languages belong to the Niger–Congo language family and are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the east of Ivory Coast.
The term "Kru" is of unknown origin. According to Westermann (1952) it was used by Europeans to denote a number of tribes speaking related dialects. Marchese (1989) notes the fact that many of these peoples were recruited as "crew" by European seafarers; "the homonymy with crew is obvious, and is at least one source of the confusion among Europeans that there was a Kru/crew tribe"
Andrew Dalby noted the historical importance of the Kru languages for their position at the crossroads of African-European interaction. He wrote that "Kru and associated languages were among the first to be encountered by European voyagers on what was then known as the Pepper Coast, a centre of the production and export of Guinea and melegueta pepper; a once staple African seaborne trade". The Kru languages are known for some of the most complex tone systems in Africa, rivaled perhaps only by the Omotic languages. Read more...
The Turkic languages are a language family of at least thirty-five documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and West Asia all the way to North Asia (particularly in Siberia) and East Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning Western China to Mongolia, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, according to one estimate, around 2,500 years ago, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.
Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 170 million people, and the total number of Turkic speakers, including second language speakers, is over 200 million. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers. Read more...
Sandawe is a "click language" spoken by about 60,000 Sandawe people in the Dodoma region of Tanzania. Language use is vigorous among both adults and children, with people in some areas monolingual. Sandawe had generally been classified as a member of the defunct Khoisan family since Albert Drexel in the 1920s, due to the presence of clicks in the language. Recent investigations however (Güldemann 2010) suggest that Sandawe may be related to the Khoe family regardless of the validity of Khoisan as a whole. A discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998).
Sandawe has two dialects, northwest and southeast. Differences include speaking speed, vowel dropping, some word taboo, and minor lexical and grammatical differences. Some Alagwa have shifted to Sandawe, and are considered a Sandawe clan. Read more...
The Tungusic languages /tʊŋˈɡʊsɪk/ (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. Some linguists consider Tungusic to be part of the controversial Altaic language family, along with Turkic, Mongolic, and sometimes Koreanic and Japonic.
The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people used by the Yakuts ("tongus") and the Siberian Tatars in the 17th century meaning "pig". It was borrowed into Russian as "тунгус", and ultimately into English as "Tungus". It became a broad term for speakers of the whole family, "Tungusic". Use of "Tungus" is now discouraged; the Russian government now uses the endonym "Evenks" officially. Read more...
The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian people of the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia, going well into the Malay peninsula. Cambodia and Vietnam serve as the northwest geographic outlier. On the northernmost geographical outlier does not pass beyond the north of Pattani, which is located in southern Thailand. Malagasy is spoken in the island of Madagascar located off the eastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Part of the language family shows a strong influence of Sanskrit and Arabic as the western part of the region has been a stronghold of Hinduism, Buddhism and, later, Islam.
Two morphological characteristics of the Malayo-Polynesian languages are a system of affixation and the reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word, such as wiki-wiki) to form new words. Like other Austronesian languages they have small phonemic inventories; thus a text has few but frequent sounds. The majority also lack consonant clusters (e.g., [str] in English). Most also have only a small set of vowels, five being a common number. Read more...
The Kwa languages, often specified as New Kwa, are a proposed but as-yet-undemonstrated family of languages spoken in the south-eastern part of Ivory Coast, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo. The name was introduced 1895 by Gottlob Krause and derives from the word for 'people' (Kwa) in many of these languages, as illustrated by Akan names. Read more...
Map showing the distribution of Bantu vs. other African languages. The Bantu area is in orange.
The Bantu languages (English: /ˈbæntuː/, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) technically the Narrow Bantu languages, as opposed to "Wide Bantu", a loosely defined categorization which includes other "Bantoid" languages, are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
As part of the Southern Bantoid group, they are part of the Benue-Congo language family, which in turn is part of the large Niger–Congo phylum. Read more...- Bohtan Neo-Aramaic is a modern Eastern Neo-Aramaic language, one of a number spoken by the Assyrians. Originally, Bohtan Neo-Aramaic was spoken on the Plain of Bohtan in Şırnak Province of southeastern Turkey as well in the town of Gardabani, near Rustavi in Georgia, Göygöl and Ağstafa in Azerbaijan. However it is now spoken in Moscow, Krymsk and Novopavlosk, Russia. It is considered to be a dialect of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic since it is a northeastern Aramaic language and its speakers are ethnically Assyrians. Read more...
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East that are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in often large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe and Australia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million), Amharic (22 million), Tigrinya (7 million), Hebrew (~5 million native/L1 speakers), Tigre (~1.05 million), Aramaic (575,000 to 1 million largely Assyrian fluent speakers) and Maltese (483,000 speakers). Read more...
The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in Southern India and parts of Central and Eastern India, as well as in Sri Lanka with small pockets in southwestern Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live outside Dravidian-speaking areas, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and they could well be indigenous to India. Read more...
A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico (c. 2nd century) depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his mouth, symbolizing speech
Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; a language is any specific example of such a system.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky. Read more...
Nihali, also known as Nahali or erroneously as Kalto, is a moribund language isolate that is spoken in west-central India (in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra), with approximately 2,000 people in 1991 out of an ethnic population of 5,000. The Nihali tribal area is just south of the Tapti River, around the village of Tembi in Nimar district (Burhanpur) of Madhya Pradesh. Speakers of the Nihali language are also present in several villages of the Buldhana district in Maharashtra such as Jamod, Sonbardi, Kuvardev, Chalthana, Ambavara, Wasali, and Cicari. There are dialectal differences between the Kuvardev-Chalthana and the Jamod-Sonbardi varieties.
The language has a very large number of words adopted from neighboring languages, with 60–70% apparently taken from Korku (25% of vocabulary and much of its morphology), from Dravidian languages, and from Marathi, but much of its core vocabulary cannot be related to them or other languages, such as the numerals and words for "blood" and "egg". Scholars state that less than 25% of the language's original vocabulary is used today. There are no longer any surviving monolingual speakers of the language. Those well-versed in modern Nihali are likely to speak varieties of Hindi, Marathi or Korku as well. Read more...
The Uralic languages (/jʊəˈrælɪk/; sometimes called Uralian languages /jʊəˈreɪliən/) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia and in the European Union. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are official languages in Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, which are officially recognized languages in various regions of Russia.
The name "Uralic" derives from the fact that the areas where the languages are spoken are found on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Read more...- Qashqai (قاشقای ديلى, also spelled Qashqay, Kashkai, Kashkay, Qašqāʾī, and Qashqa'i) is an Oghuz Turkic language spoken by the Qashqai people, an ethnic group living mainly in the Fars Province of southern Iran. Encyclopædia Iranica regards Qashqai as an independent third group of dialects within the southwestern Turkic language group. It is known to speakers as Turki. Estimates of the number of Qashqai speakers vary. Ethnologue gave a figure of 949,000 in 2015.
The Qashqai language is closely related to Azerbaijani, also known as Azeri. However, some Qashqai varieties namely the variety spoken in the Sheshbeyli tribe share features with Turkish. In a sociopolitical sense, though, Qashqai is considered a language in its own right. Read more...
The Turkic languages are a language family of at least thirty-five documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and West Asia all the way to North Asia (particularly in Siberia) and East Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning Western China to Mongolia, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, according to one estimate, around 2,500 years ago, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.
Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 170 million people, and the total number of Turkic speakers, including second language speakers, is over 200 million. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers. Read more...
The Karachay-Balkar language (Къарачай-Малкъар тил, Qaraçay-Malqar til or Таулу тил, Tawlu til, Kabardian: Къарачайбзэ) is a Turkic language spoken by the Karachays and Balkars in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay–Cherkessia, European Russia, as well as by an immigrant population in Afyonkarahisar Province, Turkey. It is divided into two dialects: Karachay-Baksan-Chegem, which pronounces two phonemes as /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, and Balkar, which pronounces the corresponding phonemes as /ts/ and /z/. The modern Karachay-Balkar written language is based on the Karachay-Baksan-Chegem dialect. The language is closely related to Kumyk. Read more...
The Uralic languages (/jʊəˈrælɪk/; sometimes called Uralian languages /jʊəˈreɪliən/) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia and in the European Union. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are official languages in Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, which are officially recognized languages in various regions of Russia.
The name "Uralic" derives from the fact that the areas where the languages are spoken are found on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Read more...
The Uralic languages (/jʊəˈrælɪk/; sometimes called Uralian languages /jʊəˈreɪliən/) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia and in the European Union. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are official languages in Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, which are officially recognized languages in various regions of Russia.
The name "Uralic" derives from the fact that the areas where the languages are spoken are found on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Read more...
The Senufo or Senufic languages (Senoufo in French) has around 15 languages spoken by the Senufo in the north of Ivory Coast, the south of Mali and the southwest of Burkina Faso. An isolated language, Nafaanra, is also spoken in the west of Ghana. The Senufo languages constitute their own branch of the Atlantic–Congo sub-family of the Niger–Congo languages. Garber (1987) estimates the total number of Senufos at some 1.5 million; the Ethnologue, based on various population estimates, counts 2.7 million.[year needed]
The Senufo languages are bounded to the west by Mande languages, to the south by Kwa languages, and to the north and east by Central Gur languages.
The Senufo languages are like the Gur languages in that they have a suffixal noun class system and that verbs are marked for aspect. Most Gur languages to the north of Senufo have a two tone downstep system, but the tonal system of the Senufo languages is mostly analysed as a three level tone system (High, Mid, Low). Read more...- Map showing the distribution of Bantu vs. other African languages. The Bantu area is in orange.
The Bantu languages (English: /ˈbæntuː/, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) technically the Narrow Bantu languages, as opposed to "Wide Bantu", a loosely defined categorization which includes other "Bantoid" languages, are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
As part of the Southern Bantoid group, they are part of the Benue-Congo language family, which in turn is part of the large Niger–Congo phylum. Read more...
Did you know...
- ... that computer science lecturer Cynthia B. Lee promoted the use of gender-neutral language across her department at Stanford University?
- ... that the 1937 Tamil-language film Bhaktha Sri Thyagaraja is based on the life of the Carnatic musician Tyagaraja?
- ... that Joseph and Emma Nāwahī co-founded the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ke Aloha Aina to oppose the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the United States?
- ... that minoritized languages are languages targeted for extermination, even when spoken by a majority of the population?
- ... that Genius Grant winner Regina Barzilay helped decipher the ancient language Ugaritic?
- ... that All India Trinamool Congress MP Uma Saren was the first person to speak in the tribal Santali language at the Inter-Parliamentary Union?
Need help?
Do you have a question about Language that you can't find the answer to?
Consider asking it at the Wikipedia reference desk.
Get involved
For editor resources and to collaborate with other editors on improving Wikipedia's Language-related articles, see WikiProject Language.
Selected images
Ferdinand de Saussure developed the structuralist approach to studying language.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most important linguistic theorists of the 20th century.
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.
A conversation in American Sign Language
Arnold Lakhovsky, The Conversation (c. 1935)
The first page of the poem Beowulf, written in Old English in the early medieval period (800–1100 AD). Although Old English is the direct ancestor of modern English, it is unintelligible to contemporary English speakers.
Together, the eight countries in red contain more than 50% of the world's languages. The areas in blue are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.
Language Areas of the brain. The Angular Gyrus is represented in orange, Supramarginal Gyrus is represented in yellow, Broca's area is represented in blue, Wernicke's area is represented in green, and the Primary Auditory Cortex is represented in pink.
A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico (c. 2nd century) depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his mouth, symbolizing speech
The Wall of Love in Paris, where the phrase "I love you" is featured in 250 languages of the world
Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn
An inscription of Swampy Cree using Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, an abugida developed by Christian missionaries for Indigenous Canadian languages
Cuneiform is the first known form of written language, but spoken language predates writing by at least tens of thousands of years.
William Jones discovered the family relation between Latin and Sanskrit, laying the ground for the discipline of historical linguistics.
In the news
- 25 April 2019 –
- The parliament of Ukraine passes a language law in a vote of 278 to 38 that will secure the use of Ukrainian as the country's only official language. (RFE/RL)
