FOREIGN LANGUAE

I'm an anthropologist. I used to ask my students this question: about how many languages are there in the world?

I'm not talking dialects. I'm talking a working definition of language, which is that if I speak it and you don't, you don't know what I'm saying to you.

So, letsrunners, give some opinions. I used to have the class name as many as they could...they never got past 40 or 50.

I'll challenge anybody to match my language record: I claim to speak a real language ("Nagovisi" or "Sibbe") with FEWER speakers of it than any language anybody else on here speaks. When I learned it, in 1969, there were only about 7000 people speaking it. In all of N America at the moment there are two speakers of it, and I'm one of them. Makes it hard to hold a conversation.

Let's have some guesses here. I'm not asking how many you can name ... just how many you think exist in the world.

saursoor wrote:

I do wrote:

min int??

don't speak any maltese, but i'm guessing you asked "who are you?" close? i've always been interested in maltese, with it's phoenician semitic roots.

yep that's exactly what it means! good intuition!

arabic.

There are approximately 7000 languages in the world, but most are used by fewer than 10,000 people. Papua New Guinea alone has 700 different languages within it's borders.

A winner! Sad to say, the current count's down to maybe 6,000.

If you name the 40 or 50 of the world largest languages, you've probably included 85 or 90 percent of the world's population, maybe more. A consequence is exactly what Coelacanth says -- the other thousands are spoken in very small communities.

Some language communities are awfully small. Nagovisi is spoken on Bougainville Island (part of Papua New Guinea). If I left my house and walked a couple of hours I'd be among the Baitsi -- all 450 of them. They had their own language. When I was there, another language went dead...there was only one speaker of it still alive, and when he died it was gone. Fortunately, a linguist got to the old man for long enough to make some recordings.

Moi j'ai eu l'occasion de faire un cours de langue intensif en France (en fait j'y suis allé deux fois...cet été et en 2005). Chaque fois je ne suis resté qu'un mois, mais j'ai bien réussi à èlever mon niveau de français grâce à ce programme. Les cours ont lieu à l'Université de Grenoble Stendhal et si tu ne le connais pas Grenoble est une très très jolie ville parfaite pour la course à pied...il y a des sentiers qui longent l'Isère et quoi...Pour en savoir plus, il ne faut que rechercher sur Internet "CUEF Grenoble".

Eh ben n'hésite pas à me poser des questions si besoin...

It's the same in Arabic.

yep

i think that is actually a bit of a silly question - what is language, what is dialect? this is very blurredfor example, swiss german --- germans cannot understand swiss german yet it is not considered a languagei get the feeling that it is like that with many other dialects and languages toopeople speak of languages as if it is clear cut, they blur alot and it is hard to tell when one begins and another endsanother example - italian from my understanding there are many dialects and they might not be able to understand each other if speaking to one another

Mää puhun suomee, saatanan pellet!

You sign yourself an economist. Have you ever studied or in any way been instructed in linguistics? It doesn't sound like it.

I carefully chose the phrase "working definition," and I'm not backing away from it. It's a good working definition in this message board context.

You give an anecdotal example and refer to your "feeling" -- this is evidence?

Sorry, but if you want to make pronouncements about language you're going to need to do better than that.

Try that mode of argument out on your economist colleagues and see how it flies.

I'd say your objections are silly, myself.

yes because it is such a 'hard science' fieldthat is the one thing i would admit to any non-economisteconomics and finance have become very mathematical and precise, i love it and follow it but in the end it is not a hard sciencethere have been some empirical results that have performed amazingly well but don't last as long as some of the theories that don't do as well statistically - probably in the end it is because the theory feels right and makes more sense to those who know the subjectI don't claim to know linguistics but I would certainly not get that defensive if someone replied to a post of mine in the way I did to yours - I would simply say this is the working definition I was usingrelax buddy

kakata wrote:

You sign yourself an economist. Have you ever studied or in any way been instructed in linguistics? It doesn't sound like it.

I carefully chose the phrase "working definition," and I'm not backing away from it. It's a good working definition in this message board context.

You give an anecdotal example and refer to your "feeling" -- this is evidence?

Sorry, but if you want to make pronouncements about language you're going to need to do better than that.

Try that mode of argument out on your economist colleagues and see how it flies.

I'd say your objections are silly, myself.

besides educate me then, how does this definition distinguish between a dialect and a language... what happens in cases where that line is blurred?

anEconomist wrote:

for example, swiss german --- germans cannot understand swiss german yet it is not considered a language

How about a person from Alabama and a person from South Africa. Both are theoretically speaking English.

anEconomist wrote:

besides educate me then, how does this definition distinguish between a dialect and a language... what happens in cases where that line is blurred?

You're never going to get a definitive answer. The general consensus is that Chinese is made up of different dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, etc) because while phonologically they're distinct, orthographically they're identical. However, by that same token, the difference between (for ex.) the Mandarin and Shanghai dialects is often compared to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese, and yet most people consider these two seperate languages.

yeah I know, no coincidence though! languages mix a lot.

feww wrote:

yeah I know, no coincidence though! languages mix a lot.

but this isn't because of loan words. arabic and maltese are both semitic.

Well, mostly I didn't like your using "silly." That's all.

So I'll relax now.

Coelacanth once again points in the right direction -- it's always a blurry distinction, especially in border areas.

How about another working definition: "mutually unintelligible?"

I only jumped into this thread because I've found that few people know that the world is full of languages, and I thought it would be good if more did. Excluding dialects was meant to make the number smaller -- I have no idea what it would jump up to if we let it in.

And, if any of the folks who were asking about training are still following the thread -- there's an outfit called the "Summer Institute of Linguistics," (SIL) which is a religiously-oriented group, Bible translators. They are said to be very good at training people to learn unwritten languages (after the training, you go out and learn that language). It may be that a potential student has to become part of the organization -- I don't know. Google will turn them up.

I agree