There are hundreds of languages around the world and many thousands more dialects. Often, linguists arrange the world’s languages into a sort of family tree, with languages that share similarities occupying twigs on the same branch. Conversely, more distant linguistic relatives may share only a common proto-language that forms the trunk of the tree, much like distant grandparents who died thousands of years ago would on a human family tree. The major world language families are Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic and the Niger-Congo. The distribution is displayed on the map below.
Chinese Languages
Figure 5-1: Alhambra, CA. This sign for a Baptist Church in an Asian ethnoburb of Los Angeles indicates that worship services are offered in English, Mandarin and Catonese weekly.
Nearly a billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language, giving it the distinction of having more people speak it as their primary (home) language than any other in the world. Mandarin is just one of several dialects of Chinese, so you may find that people from Beijing have a hard time understanding their countrymen from Hong Kong in Southern China who speak a dialect known as Cantonese. Chinese has been translated into English using several different systems over the years, so you may find older Americans (or older maps) calling China’s capital city things like Peiping or Peking. The Chinese use a character-based orthography or writing system that has a complex relationship to the spoken language. Chinese characters (logograms) have been adapted for use in Korea, Japan and Vietnam; even though those languages are not in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Because Chinese characters represent entire words, literate Chinese readers must know over 3,000 characters/words. This is true with for other East Asian languages as well. Developing computer software and hardware capable of functioning in East Asian languages presented an early barrier to the adoption of some technologies. The key problem were keyboards and cell phone screens that though well adapted to the alphabet-based systems used in the west, presented problems with East Asian logograms.
Figure 5-2: Map of Major World Language Families. Note that much of India and Southwest Asia share a common language with Europe. What does this suggest about ancient migration patterns? Why do you suppose the people of Madagascar speak a language related to Malaysia, rather than East Africa? Source: Wikimedia
Indo European Languages
About 3.5 million people speak one of about 450 languages in the Indo European family of languages. In addition to the Romance, Germanic and Slavic language subfamilies that dominate the linguistic landscape of Europe and much of northern Asia; the Indo-European family includes a number of Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Farsi) spoken by more than a billion people on the Indian Subcontinent as well as Iran. Mapping the diffusion of these languages offers a great deal of insight into the long and tangled history of the peoples who speak the languages in this massive linguistic family.
Romance Languages
The world’s second most commonly spoken home language is Spanish, one of the many Romance languages that evolved from a common Roman ancestor known as Vulgar Latin. While certainly there were swear words in Latin, “vulgar” in this instance refers to its use among the common people (unlike Classical Latin). Other Romance languages include, Portuguese, Italian, French and Romanian. There may be as many as two dozen additional Romance languages (Catalan, Romansh, Sicilian, etc.). Speakers of many of the less well-known members of the Romance family generally live in mountainous locations, on islands or in other isolated locations, providing an easy reminder of the role of geography on the formation and maintenance of languages. Each language in this language family features hundreds of words and linguistic structures that are similar, but they remain generally unintelligible to speakers of other languages within the language family.
Figure 5-3: Map of Languages in Europe. This map displays many of the language boundaries of Europe. Note how often the boundaries follow physiographic features on the lands, such as mountains or water bodies. Source: Wikimedia
Germanic Languages
Along with the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, the other major linguistic family in Europe is Germanic, which dominates Northern Europe. English, German, Dutch as well as the languages of Scandinavia are all related. In addition, most locations that were once part of the British Empire also speak English, including most of North America.
More people speak English, often as a second language, than any other language in the world. It isn’t because English is a particularly easy language to learn. It includes an enormous number of words adopted from other languages; and because of that, it has loads of irregular spellings and verbs. It’s also awash in slang. English became the world’s most common language largely because of the economic, cultural and military power of England and the United States. British naval power and their ambitious colonization program during the 18 and 19th centuries expanded the use of English around the globe. In fact, the map of world languages offers important clues into the military history of the world. Armies and navies always carry languages, as well as other elements of common culture, as they move. Conquered peoples are often forced to speak the language of those to whom they lost a war.
Still, English did not achieve its peculiar worldwide dominance until the British Empire was in retreat after World War II. Unlike the British, American English spread only to a couple of captured colonies. Instead, it was the United States’ ascension into the realm of economic, cultural and technological superpower that elevated the status of English to a truly global language.
A good example of how this works is evident in the global airline industry. Pilots of international flights talk to air traffic controllers on the ground in English, even if neither the pilot, nor the ground control official is from an English speaking country. Why? Partly it’s because the airplane was invented by Americans and partly because the British invented international commercial air travel. This process is similar to the doctrine of first effective settlement, discussed elsewhere in this text, but applied to technology and language. English speakers colonized the air first, so others who came later tend to follow the rules and tendencies created by the pioneers. Consider other technologies invented by Americans but now used worldwide (internet, personal computers, iphones, etc.). Many users of these technologies, especially the early adopters, find them easier to use if they know English. Certainly, the massive cultural influence of Hollywood, American pop music and the fashion industry has also helped spread English worldwide.
Figure 5-4: Bayreuth, Germany - Many fashion items for sale in Europe make vague, and sometime nearly random references to the United States using English words. Why is the imagery of America so powerful?
Linguistic Isolation
Many of the world’s least spoken languages are found in locations that are difficult for armies to invade and have few valuable resources. High mountains, islands, vast wastelands, tangled jungles and dangerous swamps have a tendency act as a barrier to the diffusion of languages. For example, Hungarians and Finns speak a language that is different than most of the rest of Europe partly because their territories were hard to invade. People on the islands of Corsica and Sardinia speak a similar language, but it’s different from their neighbors in Italy. Others, like Armenian and Greek are very far removed from their “cousins” on the Indo-European family tree, and so are called linguistic isolates.
Basque
Perhaps the best example of this process is evident in the eastern Pyrenees Mountains of Spain and France where many people speak Basque. This language is so unique, that it appears to be unrelated to any other in the world. There are theories that suggest the language is exceptionally old, perhaps dating back around 40,000 years, before the time that most European’s ancestors migrated (with their proto-language) into Europe. Some genetic evidence suggests there has been less interbreeding between Basque people and their European neighbors, which may account for how this language survived when presumably other very old European languages went extinct. The rugged mountains where Basques have lived for thousands of years surely played a role in protecting their language and culture from invasion and succession. About 60,000 Basque-Americans live in the US, many in Central California.
Figure 5-5: San Miguel, California -Basque Restaurant. People from this unique linguistic minority came to the United States and largely settled in California where the landscape resembles their home territory in Spain.
Language and War
Over the centuries, membership in a language or even a language family has proven critical in the fates of individuals, regions and nations. When a Slavic-speaking Bosnian Serb assassinated the German-speaking Archduke of Austria, Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, in 1914, World War I began. Though there were numerous additional reasons for the First World War, linguistic families created the basis of the first alliances. The Russians had agreed to aid their Slavic cousins in Serbia. Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire allied with each other because they both spoke German.
The earliest rumblings of World War II in Europe also involved language. Adolph Hitler wanted to expand Germany’s borders to include parts of neighboring countries where a significant population of German speakers lived. German speaking Austria became part of Germany in early 1938 in a process known as Anschluss. Nazi Germany later that year forcibly annexed parts of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland because, in the logic of Hitler, their common language gave Germany the right to annex those areas. Later, all of the Czech speaking and Slovak speaking areas were taken as well. When Germany invaded Poland, to take land where the language was once primarily German, World War II began.
It’s worth noting that many wars have been fought between people of similar linguistic heritage as well. However, the longstanding alliances between the U.S. and other English speaking nations of the world is no doubt a product of the way our common language has shaped a common core of values that bind us in ways that are especially strong.
