Today

1
Today

• Historical linguistics
• From language birth...to language extinction
• Endangered languages
• Language change
• Language families
• Readings 12.1-12.2

2
From language birth...to language death

• Creoles the newest languages in the world
  today are the result of creolization
• 1970s Nicaraguan sign language
• 1850s Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea)
• 1770s Seselwa (Seychelles, Madagascar)

3
From language birth...to language death

• Creoles some are becoming national languages
  (Tok Pisin), others are, like conventional
  languages, dying out.
• Why do languages die?

Loss of native speakers cultural transmission
ends when there are no children learning it - all
speakers die (cataclysm or population
attrition) - speakers are absorbed by another
culture with another language and social need for
the language decreases
4
From language birth...to language death

• Types of language death
• Sudden--all speakers die or are killed (, e.g.
  Tasmanian)
• Radical--speakers stop using the language under
  threat of political repression or genocide (Nez
  Perce)
• Gradual-- (most common) minority language dies
  out in contact with socially dominant language
• Bottom-to-top--survives only in a few contexts
  (e.g., Latin liturgical usages)

5
Endangered languages

• Only 20 of Native American languages remaining
  in the US are being natively learned by children
• Comanche, Apache, Cherokee becoming extinct (like
  Indo-European lgs Hittite, Tocharian, Cornish)
• Some languages are being revitalized

6
(No Transcript)
7
Revitalization

• Language Revitalization refers to any deliberate
  effort to recover the spoken use of a language
  that is no longer spoken or learned at home
• corpus planning
• status planning
• Virginia Algonquian (aka Potomac, Chesapeake)

December 2006, Washington Post article http//www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/
11/AR2006121101474.html?referreremailarticle
8
Revitalization

• corpus planning
• modernization of the lexicon (vocabulary)
• implement a writing system
• status planning
• build lay loyalty
• Irish We will not go along with the mistaken
  view that this wailing over the language is all
  sentimentality
• accept language in broader range of social
  functions

9
Revitalization

• Why?
• Through its grammar, each language provides new
  evidence on the nature of human cognition. And in
  its literature, poetry, ritual speech, and word
  structure, each language stores the collective
  intellectual achievements of a culture...
  (Fromkin et al. 2007)
• There are 6,000 languages in the world
• 3,000 of these have died or will die during the
  present century
• Endangered Language Fund
• http//www.endangeredlanguagefund.org/

10
Language change

• Languages are constantly changing
• Language change is normal
• Language change ? decay, corruption

11
Why do languages change?

• Possible reasons
• Isolated groups develop separately
• Speakers introduce innovations
• Optional rules may become obligatory

12
Historical Linguistics

• Concerned with
• How languages change over time
• How languages are related to one another
• Diachronic change language change over time
• Synchronic change language change at a
  particular point in time

13
Historical Linguistics

• Sir William Jones (1788) noted that Sanskrit
  shared many similarities with Greek, Latin
• He suggested they had a common ancestor

14
Comparative Method

• Deducing genetic relations between languages by
  comparing cognates
• Cognates words from different languages that
  are similar in form and meaning, suggesting a
  common origin
• Used to reconstruct the proto-language (ancestor
  language)

15
month
Related Not related

• English
• Dutch
• German
• Swedish
• Welsh
• Gaelic
• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Russian
• Greek
• Hindi

• month
• Maand
• monat
• månad
• mis
• mí
• mois
• mes
• mês
• mese
• myesyats
• minas
• mahina

Arabic (Afro-Asiatic) Finnish (Uralic) Basque
(Independent) Turkish (Altaic) Malay
(Malayo-Polynesian) Zulu (Niger-Congo) Mandarin
(Sino-Tibetan) Kannada (Dravidian) Vietnamese
(Austro-Asiatic) Cherokee (Iroquoian)

• shahr
• kuukausi
• hilabethe
• ay
• bulan
• inyanga
• yue
• timgalu
• thang
• iyanvda

16
night

• night English
• nuit French
• Nacht German
• nicht Scots
• natt Swedish
• nat Danish
• noch' Russian
• nox Latin

• nakti- Sanskrit
• natë Albanian
• noche Spanish
• noite Portuguese
• notte Italian
• nit Catalan
• nótt Icelandic
• naktis Lithuanian

17
Proto-Indo-European (PIE)

• The proposed parent language of all Indo-European
  languages
• No direct evidence for it (unwritten)
• Reconstructed from later Indo-European languages
  by back-tracking known sound changes

18
False cognates

• Words that are thought to have a common origin,
  but which are unrelated.
• e.g., Latin habere, German haben to have
• German haben lt PIE kap, to grasp
• Latin habere lt PIE ghabh, to give, receive

19
Family Tree Model

• Indicates genetically related languages that
  share common ancestor
• The higher up in the tree, the older it is
• Mother/parent
• Daughters
• Sisters

20

• Latin
• French Italian Spanish Portuguese

? Mother ? Daughters
Sisters
21
Extinct langs Sub-families
22
(No Transcript)
23
Other major Language Families

• Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian)
• Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Hebrew)
• Niger-Congo (Swahili, Zulu)
• Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese)
• Altaic (Mongolian, Turkish, Japanese?)
• Austronesian (Indonesian, Hawaiian)

24
Language Isolates

• No known relatives
• Basque (Spain)
• Zuni (New Mexico)

25
Family Tree Model problems

• Implies each language is separate, independent
  from its neighbors
• But distinctions btw. languages are fuzzy
• Suggests new languages appear/branch off suddenly
• But languages diverge gradually
• Cannot accommodate mixed languages

26
Family Tree Model problems

• Cannot accommodate creoles (mixed languages)

e.g. China Coast Pidgin English (1600-1800)
Proto-Indo-European . . . Early Modern
English Modern English China Coast Pidgin
English
Brit Engl North Am Engl
Is CCPE in some sense more closely related to
Early Modern English than to Cantonese?
27
Family Tree Model problems

• China Coast Pidgin English should be represented,
  because it has offspring

China Coast PE
South Seas Jargon
Sandalwood English
Early Melanesian Pidgin
28
Wave Model

• Language changes spread like ripples in a pond
• Different points of origin
• Overlap of different waves of change explains
  synchronic variation

29
Wave Model