Week1-3Language Diversity and Ethnologue

How many languages?

• Difficult to say…
• Estimate: 6k ~ 7k languages around the world given by Ethnologue

Ethnologue

Ethnologue is free and you can use it to find information about countries, about languages, about language families, etc..

Language Diversity

• Language with around 20 different vowel sound v.s. others that may only have 2 or 3
• some language put information mainly on word, Turkish v.s. others with short words, Vietnamese

Language Families

Languages that are historically related to each other are grouped into language families.

• Romance -> Indo-European, Germanic -> Indo-European
• Other families: Dravidian, Niger-Congo(Swahili)
• There are also confusion
• Isolated, do not seem related (Basque)

Why can languages be so similar?

• reasons of contact
• physical reasons