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Today Historical linguistics From language
birth...to language extinction
Endangered languages Language change Language families
Readings: 12.1-12.2
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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)
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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
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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)
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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
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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?referrer=emailarticle
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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
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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/
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Language change Languages are constantly changing Language change is normal Language change ≠ decay, corruption
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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
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Historical Linguistics Sir William Jones (1788): noted that
Sanskrit shared many similarities with Greek, Latin
He suggested they had a common ancestor
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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)
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‘month’
EnglishDutchGermanSwedishWelshGaelicFrenchSpanishPortugueseItalianRussianGreekHindi
monthMaandmonat
månadmismí
moismesmês
mesemyesyats
minasmahina
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)
shahrkuukausihilabethe
aybulan
inyangayue
timgaluthang
iyanvda
Related Not related
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‘night’night Englishnuit FrenchNacht Germannicht Scotsnatt Swedishnat Danishnoch' Russiannox Latin
nakti- Sanskritnatë Albaniannoche Spanishnoite Portuguesenotte Italiannit Catalannótt Icelandicnaktis Lithuanian
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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
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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
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Latin
French Italian Spanish Portuguese
Mother
Daughters
Sisters
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Extinct langs
Sub-families
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Language Isolates No known relatives
Basque (Spain) Zuni (New Mexico)
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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
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Family Tree Model: problems Cannot accommodate creoles (mixed languages)
Proto-Indo-European
.
.
.
Early Modern English
Modern English China Coast Pidgin English
Brit Engl North Am Engl
e.g. China Coast Pidgin English (1600-1800)
Is CCPE in some sense “more closely related” to Early Modern English than to Cantonese?
Sino-Tibetan
China Coast Pidgin English Cantonese Mandarin Wu Min...
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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
Australian PE Roper River Creole New Hebrides Pidgin Tok Pisin Hawaiian English