26-07-2017

HS309: Introduction to
the study of language
Instructor:
Prof. Vaijayanthi M. Sarma
(and a few guest lecturers)

TAs

Gayathri Gopalakrishnan Nawaf Helmi Mashrur Imtiaz

senoritag3@gmail.com nawafh123@gmail.com mail.mashrur@gmail.com

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Textbook and Background Reading

- PDFs on moodle

Texting and surfing in

Do so well in your
class you are?
exams, you will not.

Distract your
classmates and
yourself, you will

Cool, it is not.

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Mobile phones, laptops etc.

• Students are not encouraged to bring laptops to class. A ‘closed
laptop’ rule during lecture will be enforced and other communication
devices will need to be on ‘silent’ and put away during lectures.
• Use pen and paper! Read the textbook (relevant sections or page
numbers will be shared on moodle).
• The ppts will be shared but…
• Use moodle (after class!); talk to your TAs

Evaluation and Attendance

• Attendance in the first week, institute policy applies.

• After that?
• Evaluation:
• In-class Quizzes (3x10 = 30 marks)
• MidSem (30 marks)
• Endsem (40 marks)

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In class quizzes?
• The only time that phones are permitted in class
• On quiz days
• For 15 minutes

What make us human?

• Walking on two legs? (Bipeds)

• Birds walk on two legs, as can bears
• Living in a society?
• Ants, bees, marmosets live in societies.
• Ability to love and hate?
• My pet dog loves me and appears to hate
cats.

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Language

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a

mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious
generations

-- Edward Sapir
(Language: An Introduction to the Study of
Speech, 1921.)

Features of Languages
• The power of speech appears to be uniquely human, we talk.
• Speech vs vocalization (there is no significant animal analogue)
• It infuses all of our lives – everyday, in every way.
• No matter the literacy levels
• No matter the socio-economic or political status
• No matter how primitive a people or their society
• No matter the intelligence levels
• Children become competent users by the time they are 4 years old and entirely
fluent by the time they are 10 years old – often in more than one language and in
several varieties.

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Multilinguals

• French • Pahlavi
• Swiss- • Latin • Syriac
German • Greek • Persian
• French • Hebrew • Coptic
• German • Arabic • Ge'ez
• English • Amharic • …
• Swedish • Sanskrit
and Italian
• Avestan

Distribution of languages in the world -

Wikipedia

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Goals of the Course

• Our main concern is an object of inquiry called Language, that is thought to be

the quintessence of human existence.
• Throughout this course, we will look at this object from multiple perspectives
• At the end of the course, it is expected that you will
• understand and come to appreciate the complex nature of this object
• gain insights into how you (yourselves) and the people around you
manipulate this object all the time
• be able to apply and use some of the tools of linguistic analysis in various
ways

Micro-level

• The micro level study of Language
(and therefore, all human languages)
concerns
• the structure
• the organization
• the universal and language-specific
properties
of the linguistic system
(General or Theoretical Linguistics)
• Some of the questions we might ask
will concern
• Spoken systems of sounds
(Phonetics and Phonology)
• Working with words (Morphology)
• Stringing of sentences (Syntax)
• Meaning making (Semantics)
• Pragmatic Practices (Contextual
Use, Pragmatics)

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Macro-level – interdisciplinary areas

• The macro level study of Language (and therefore, all human languages)
concerns
• Psychology – Psycholinguistics: language acquisition, processing and
production; memory, learning and behaviour; language disruption
• Neuroscience – Neurolinguistics: neural structures involved, storage and
retrieval, neuropathology of language (aphasia, William’s, Autism…)
• Biology – Biolinguistics: Language evolution; homologues; genes
• Computer Science – Computational Linguistics: computational and
mathematical properties of language and the design of grammars and the
development of tools for language-based tasks

More Macro-level
• Sociology – Sociolinguistics: relation between language and society and the social
factors that influence/determine language systems and their use
• Anthropology – Anthropological Linguistics: Language and human society and cultures,
ethics
• History – Historical/Comparative/Diachronic Linguistics: Reconstruction, Language
Change, Etymology
• Literature – Aesthetics and Stylistics, Textual Analysis, Creative Writing, Translation
• Applied Linguistics – Education (Foreign, Second Language Learning), Writing Practices,
Grammar Education
• Metalinguistics: relation between language and other cultural factors; humour,
metaphor, riddle, idioms

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Still more…
• Domains of Use – Politics and Journalism: Language as a political tool;
propaganda, persuasion, media, advertising, ideology, rhetoric,
linguistic policies, gendering etc.
• Forensic Science and Law – Forensic Linguistics: Application of
linguistic knowledge to the context of law, crime investigation, trial
and judicial processes

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Language Variation

• There are numerous languages in the world

• Questions we might ask include:
• How many exactly?
• Who counts them?
• What is the extent and limits of diversity in the world’s languages?

Language Variation - more

• We might suppose that linguists have a clear and reasonably precise notion of
how many languages there are in the world. However, that there is no such
definite count—or at least, no such count that has any status as a scientific
finding of modern linguistics. Main reasons:
• There are still unexplored parts of the world (forests of the Amazon, or the
Andamans) for us to ascertain the range of people who live there.
• The very notion of enumerating languages is a lot more complicated when we
begin to do it. There are a number of coherent (but quite different) answers
that linguists might give – and much depends on politics, identity, literacy and
power.

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But, do we have an estimate?

• The most extensive catalogue of the world’s languages, generally
taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of Ethnologue (published
by SIL International) whose 2009 list included 6,909 distinct
languages.

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What’s the difficulty in counting?

• What you call Tamarind in Ex. Pancakes, griddle cakes, flapjacks

English is Ex. Chowl (Bengali)
• Puli (Tamil) Chokha (Gujarati)
Chawal (Hindi)
• Puli / Valan Puli (Malayalam) Chaula (Oriya)
• Huli (Kannada) Tomul (Kashmiri)
• Chinthapandu (Telugu) Tandool (Marathi
Akki (Kannada)
• Chinchamb/Amptan (Konkani) Ari (Malayalam)
• Chincha (Marathi) Arisi (Tamil)
• Amli (Gujarati) Biyyam (Telugu).
• Imli (Hindi, Punjabi)
• Tentuli (Bengali) • Dialect continuum
• Tamber (Kashmiri)

The need to differ

• Sometimes counting is not hard – Iraq, Arabic and Iran, Farsi –

different unrelated languages, nations.
• Sometimes the linguistic differences are small as with Norwegian and
Swedish - mutually intelligible, but have different customs, histories
and governments.
• Likewise with Malaysians and Indonesians and Bulgarian and
Macedonians - different languages, two different nations.
• But…

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Bulgarians, for instance, consider

Macedonian a dialect of
Bulgarian, but Macedonians insist
that it is a distinct language.
When Macedonia’s president
Gligorov visited Bulgaria’s
president Zhelev in 1995, he
brought an interpreter, although
Zhelev claimed he could
understand everything Gligorov
said.

• Somewhat less fancifully,

Kalabari and Nembe are
two linguistic varieties
spoken in Nigeria. The
Nembe claim to be able to
understand Kalabari with no
difficulty, but the rather
more prosperous Kalabari
regard the Nembe as poor
country cousins whose
speech is unintelligible

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I 1877 forlod Brandes København og

bosatte sig i Berlin. (Danish)

I 1877 forlot Brandes København og

bosatte seg i Berlin. (Norwegian)

I 1877 forlod Brandes København og

bosatte sig i Berlin. (Swedish)

Translation:
In 1877 Brandes left Copenhagen
and took up residence in Berlin.

Creating differences and similarities

• Sometimes linguistic cousins (mutually intelligible) go to great lengths
to distinguish the one from the other
• Serbs (Roman Catholics) and Croats (Orthodox), Latin vs Cyrillic
(Bosnia-Herzogovina)
• India and Pakistan, Devanagiri vs Perso-Arabic script, religious
differences, nation states
• Sometimes the opposite happens: China, seven or more regional
varieties, not mutually comprehensible (like the Romance Languages)
but united by a single, ancient script (Mandarin-Beijing, Wu-
Shanghainese, Min-Taiwanese Hokkein, Yue – Cantonese, Hakka etc.)
and government policy.

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Politics of it all
• Max Weinreich (linguist and Yiddish scholar) is credited with
saying, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”, when
talking about the status of Yiddish, long considered a “dialect” of High
German because it was not identified with any politically significant
entity.
• The distinction is still often implicit in talk about European
“languages” vs. African “dialects.” What counts as a language rather
than a “mere” dialect typically involves issues of statehood,
economics, literary traditions and writing systems, and other
trappings of power, authority and culture — with purely linguistic
considerations playing a less significant role.

Which English? Differing in time…

• Related to this is the fact that we refer to the language of, say,
Chaucer (1400), Shakespeare (1600), Thomas Jefferson (1800) and
George W. Bush (2000) all as “English,” but it is safe to say these are
not all mutually intelligible.
• Shakespeare might have been able, with some difficulty, to converse
with Chaucer or even with Jefferson, but Jefferson (and certainly
Bush) would need an interpreter for Chaucer (as do we).
• Languages change gradually over time, maintaining intelligibility
across adjacent generations, but eventually yielding very different
systems

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Can we really count?

• The notion of distinctness among languages, is much harder to
resolve than it seems at first sight. Political and social
considerations trump purely linguistic reality, and the criterion of
mutual intelligibility is ultimately inadequate.
• Can Linguistics do any better? When we address the question of
just when forms of speech differ systematically from a linguistic
point of view, we get answers that are potentially clear, but rather
surprising.

Distinguishing between languages

By looking at the patterns of words and sentences:

• Very different languages can share words (through borrowing) while different
speakers of the “same” language may vary widely in their vocabulary due to
factors of education or speaking style.
• Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single
language may display a great variety of patterns
• Linguists find that the analysis of the external facts of language use is not as useful
as the study of the abstract knowledge speakers have which allows them
to produce/understand what they say or hear or read: their internalized
knowledge of the grammar of their language.

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Linguistic Control

• Centuries of French governments have striven to make that

country linguistically uniform, but (even disregarding Breton, a
Celtic language; Allemannisch, the Germanic language spoken
in Alsace; and Basque in Basque country), Ethnologue shows at
least ten distinct Romance languages spoken in France,
including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, Arpitan etc. in addition to
“French”.
• Académie française, 1635, 4o members (immortals!); restored
to the Institut de France in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte
(suppressed during the French Revolution in 1793).

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Kinship

• Languages belong to a family, i.e., a group of languages that can be shown to be

genetically related to one another.
• The best known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which
English and Hindi (Indo-Iranian sub-branch) belong.
• Indo-European languages are widely distributed geographically with strong
influence in world affairs. There are ~230 Indo-European languages but more
families of languages (~250) worldwide.

Other language families in India are

• Dravidian
• Austro-Asiatic (Antal and
Munda languages, Khasi,
Nicobarese)
• Sino-Tibetan (Meithei, Bodo,
Naga, Garo, Lepcha etc.)
• Great Andamanese and
Ongan languages.
• A few isolates: Burushaski
(Baltistan), Nihali (MP,
Maharashtra; Korku
vocabulary)

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Diversity
• Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just
as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and
animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages.
• Out of Ethnologue’s 7097 (2016), for instance, only 287 are spoken in
Europe, while some 2294 are spoken in Asia.

Diversity by area

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Papua New Guinea

• One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea,
where there are an estimated 840 living languages spoken by a population
of around 8 million. That makes the average number of speakers around
10,000, possibly the lowest of any area of the world.
• These languages belong to between 50 and 60 distinct families.
• Official languages: Tok Pisin, English, Hiri Motu and PNG Sign Language
• Area: ~450 thousand sq. km.
It is conjectured that linguistic diversity and bio-diversity are
correlated.

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Diversity Index: the

Areas of highest linguistic diversity
probability that any
two speakers will NOT
share the same mother
tongue or first
language (L1)

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Areas of lowest linguistic diversity

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Dominance
• Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power
and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the
world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically
distinct families.
• Mandarin Chinese (~900 million), all varieties (~1.3 billion)
• English, 106 countries by about 372 million people
• Spanish, 31 countries by about 432 million people
• Hindi, 5 countries (India, Guyana, Nepal, South Africa and Singapore), ~260 m
• Arabic, 57 countries, 295 million
• Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, German, French and Indonesian,
Malay (with 100-250 million)
Note: native speakers only; if second language speakers are included (image above) then
some languages (used for trade, lingua franca) will have a very dominant presence

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Language Loss
• Whatever the world’s linguistic diversity at the present, it is steadily
declining, as local forms of speech increasingly become moribund
before the advance of the major languages of world civilization.
• When a language ceases to be learned by young children, its days
are clearly numbered, and we can predict with near certainty that it
will not survive the death of the current native speakers.
• Linguists generally agree in estimating that the extinction within the
next century of at least 3,000 of the ~7000 languages listed by
Ethnologue 2017, is virtually guaranteed under the present
circumstances.

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Scale of language loss, some numbers

Number of languages: ~7097 (Ethnologue 2017)
• 397 or ~5.6% languages have >1M speakers = 94% of
population
• 94.4 % of languages spoken by a mere 6% of population
• Of these:
• 144 languages have less than 1-9 speakers left
• 464 languages “nearly extinct” with 1-100 speakers
• 1,980 languages are spoken by 1000-10,000 speakers
Median size of a language in the world: ~3000 speakers

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 Ethnologue, Language
Status Scale (EGIDS)

55%

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20%

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North America

• Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed (apart from the

status of French in Canada) in terms of English vs. Spanish, or the
languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer
• The Americas were a region with many languages well before modern
Europeans or Asians arrived.
• Before European invasion:
• 20M Native Americans, 300 languages

North American Example

• Today:
• 2M Native Americans, 175 languages
• Of these 175 languages
• 55 have <5 speakers = virtually extinct,
100 endangered, 20 may survive, are
spoken by children, ~8 have > 10,000
speakers
• All we know of the lost languages comes from
early word lists or limited grammatical and
textual records.
• (www.indigenous-language.org)

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Australia

• Before European invasion:

• 750,000-1M Indigenous Australians,
over 300 languages
• Today:
• 150 languages survive, all are
endangered
• 10-15 of these are spoken by
children

Anindilyakwa 1,290 (2006 census).

Dhuwal 300 (2015 C. Bow).
Djeebbana 340, all users. 240 (2006 census). 100 (1991).
Djinang 210 (2006 census). 170 Djinang, 43 Wulaki (2006 census).
Gurindji Kriol 1,000 (Meakins 2013).
Malay, Cocos Islands 1,000 (1987). 500 in Cocos Islands, 560 on
Christmas Island (1987).
Maung 260 (2006 census).
Pintiini 320 (2006 census). EGIDS 6a
Warumungu310 (2006 census).
Yankunytjatjara 560 (2006 census).
Yindjibarndi 310 (2006 census).
Yolngu Sign Language 5,000 (2012 D. Adone). Of these, about 40–
50 are deaf (Adone et al 2012).

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 Closer home,
UNESCO atlas

Brazil

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Pre-Roman Italy

Latin essentially
replaced Etruscan,
Umbrian, Oscan etc.

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Implications of Language Loss

• About 90% of human knowledge encoded in languages is:
• The (intellectual) property of indigenous peoples
• Erosion of human ‘knowledge’ at an unprecedented pace
• Erasing indigenous identities and societies (coupled with human rights violations) - cultural,
spiritual, and intellectual life ranging from prayers, myths, ceremonies, poetry, oratory, and
technical vocabulary, to greetings, leave-takings, conversational styles, humour, ways of
speaking to children, and unique terms for habits, behavior, and emotion
• Cultural invisibility of the speakers of a quarter of the world’s languages
• Loss to the minority community of their group markers (such as sense of family and
community, kinship ideas, sanctity of the word/language etc.)
• The threat of extinction affects a vastly greater proportion of the world’s languages than
even its biological species

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Ezra Pound (American Poet and Critic)

• Summed up the core intellectual argument:

"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and
no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of
human comprehension."

Cherokee example – Unique Culture

• No word for goodbye, only “I will see you again”.
• No phrase for “I’m sorry”.
• Special expressions all its own – oo-kah-huh-sdee –represents the
mouth-watering, cheek-pinching delight experienced when seeing an
adorable baby or a kitten

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Cherokee example - Knowledge

• Accumulated body of knowledge
• Geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy,
pharmacology, botany, meteorology and more
• Territory in southern Appalachian Mountains with words for every
last berry, stem, frond and toadstool in the region; the names also
convey what kind of properties that object might have – whether it’s
edible or poisonous or has some medicinal value.
• No culture has (or should have) a monopoly on human creativity and
genius

Cherokee example – human mind

• Cherokee language is verb rather than noun-based, and those verbs
can be conjugated in a multitude of ways based on who they are
acting upon. Depending on the suffix, speakers can indicate whether
a noun is toward or away from them; uphill or downhill; or upstream
or down stream.
• Grammatical variations both in what is encoded and how it is
encoded, vocabulary differences as well.
• (Non Cherokee example: Gender variations in Marathi (3), English (3),
Hindi (2), French (2), Swahili (10) etc.)

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Factors of endangerment

• Pressures exerted by matrix languages on ‘minority’ languages and

people (assimilation pressures and active policies to erase diversity)
• Limit access to mainstream economic opportunities
• Potential for ridicule, discrimination, prejudice (stigmatization)
• Lack of resources for instruction in the native language; Lack of
orthography, standardization, literary tradition
• Limited scope for using the language – restricted domains of use
• Dialect fragmentation (splitting into smaller dialects and communities)

Factors of endangerment contd.

• Natural disasters (Tsunamis, earthquakes)
• Migration
• Invasions and genocide
• Domain loss or specialization of the language to domains, personal,
religious, ritualistic etc.)
• Personal choices, largely made by people aged 5 years old and less!

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Examples
• Puroik or Sulung (ST), Arunachal Pradesh; at war with
others; in bonded labour to the Nishi (most populous tribe
of AP); pushed to remote areas
• Rapanui, on Easter Island in the Pacific; taken as slaves to
collect guano (dung) from the coast of South America.
• Brazil, ranchers and illegal timber cutters drove the Jiahui
people out of their traditional lands into the hands of
hostile neighbours; migration to cities.
• Rikbatsá people in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, great
warriors, but couldn’t fight epidemics of influenza and
smallpox that were brought by Jesuit missionaries.

Stages in death

• Three-generational drop-off
• Last fully fluent generation giving way to assimilation forces
• Transitional generation, culturally at home with the traditional language
and reasonably comfortable with the dominant one
• The third generation that is more at home linguistically and culturally with
the dominant language than the traditional one
• When the native speakers belong to the third type, the language is
endangered or threatened. Endangerment is determined by particular social
circumstances.

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Killer languages!
• English vs Native American languages
• English vs. Spanish in America, vs. French in Canada
• Spanish vs Amazonian languages
• Greek vs Arvanitika (Albanian)
• English in Bonin Islands (Pacific Ocean) yielding to Japanese
• Hindi, Tamil-Kannada

Killer Policies – Native American Schools

• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865 (for full account)
According to Col. Richard Pratt's speech in 1892:
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of
his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I
agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be
dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
• From Need to 'National Tragedy'
Early in the history of American Indian boarding schools, the U.S. government argued that
Indians were savages who should be compelled to send their children to schools by
whatever means necessary. Later the government recommended increased Indian control
over education at the schools.
A report in the late 1880s defended the early days of the schools. In the 1920s, a report
concluded that children at federal boarding schools were malnourished, overworked,
harshly punished and poorly educated. And in 1969, a report declared Indian education to
be a national tragedy.

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What happens when a language “dies”?

• Some would say that the death of a language is much less

worrisome than that of a species.
• After all, what about Hebrew? Died and was reborn/revived (Israel)
• Further, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for
another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should
we question the wisdom of that choice?

But…
• The economic argument does not really supply a reason for speakers of
a “small” and perhaps unwritten language to abandon that language
simply because they also need to learn a widely used language such as
English or Mandarin Chinese. Where there is no one dominant local
language, and groups with diverse linguistic heritages come into regular
contact with one another, multilingualism is a perfectly natural
condition.
• When a language dies, a world dies with it, in the sense that a
community’s connection with its past, its traditions and its base of
specific knowledge are all typically lost as the vehicle linking people to
that knowledge is abandoned. This is not a necessary step, for them to
become participants in a larger economic or political order.

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Language Revival

• The revival of Biblical Hebrew in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the
formation of the Jewish nation and the development of modern
Israeli Hebrew.
• Maori and New Zealand in New Zealand appears to be making a
comeback with te kohanga reo or language ‘nests’ that provide a
language-immersion experience for young Maoris
• Ulwa in Karawala, Nicaragua (~400 speakers), Misumalpan Language

Language Revival - Caveats

Hebrew was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no
longer the principal language of the Jewish people. It remained an
object of intense study and analysis by scholars.
There are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that
language death is reversible or that revival is feasible.

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Recipe for resuscitation?

• Timely intervention:
• Speech communities don’t decide to get rid of their own languages
• Individuals (usually children) decide not to use them
• By the time the speech community notices the effect of these personal
decisions, it is usually too late to save the language
• Linguists are discouraged from working on “small” or “isolated” languages

Resuscitation contd.
• Promote embedded languages
• Assess level of endangerment
• Connect with groups that are
• Local, national, international
• Political, social, business
• Target types of pressure exerted by matrix languages
• Develop specific strategies (instructional materials, dictionaries, grammars,
policies)

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The key ingredient though

• Is not money, or size, or power
• The speech community must WANT to save their language
• Recognize importance for identity
• Take ownership of issues
• Have a vision

Summary

• We began with language counting. Any remaining imprecision is perhaps

integral to a census-like operation: perhaps some of the languages were not
home when the Ethnologue counter came calling, or perhaps some of them
have similar names that make it hard to know when we are dealing with one
language and when with several; but these are problems that could be solved
in principle, and the fuzziness of our numbers should thus be quite small.
• What we find is rather that what makes languages distinct from one another
turns out to be much more a social and political issue than a linguistic one,
and most of the cited numbers are matters of opinion rather than science.
• But whatever the count, we are facing a monumental loss of linguistic and
cultural diversity.

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Organisations
• U.S.-based Terralingua
• U.K.-based Foundation For Endangered Languages
• UNESCO Endangered Languages Project
• The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project of the School of
Oriental and African Studies

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