On the basis of isoglosses outline cultural regions of world.
Ans. Language is an organized system of spoken words by which people communicate with each other with mutual comprehension. Languages differ greatly in their relative importance, if ‘importance’ can be taken to mean the number of people using them. More than half of the world’s 5 billion inhabitants are speakers of just eight of its thousands of tongues. At the other end of the scale are a number of rapidly declining languages whose speakers number in the hundreds or, at most, the few thousands.
The diversity of languages is simplified when we recognize among them related families. A language family is a group of languages descended from a single, earlier tongue. By varying estimates, from at least 30 to perhaps 100 such families of languages are found worldwide. The families, in turn, may be subdivided into subfamilies, branches, or groups of more closely related tongues.
Family relationship between languages can be recognized through similarities in their vocabulary and grammar. By tracing back through time regularities of sound changes in different languages, linguists are able to reconstruct earlier forms of words and, eventually, determine a word’s original form before it underwent alteration and divergence. Such a reconstructed earlier form is said to belong to a protolanguage.
The distinction between a language and a dialect is not based on an objective measure of mutual intelligibility. Instead we must recognize that language is a function of society’s view of what constitutes a cultural community – a matter that in turn is influenced by historical developments in the political arena. The ability of the Chinese political elite to build and sustain a state encompassing speakers of different, albeit closely related Sino-Tibetan tongues helps explain Chinese as one language. By contrast, the disintegrating of the Danish and Swedish empires is partly responsible for our tendency to recognize several distinct languages in Scandinavia. Under the circumstances, the actual number of languages in use remains a matter of debate. Languages are ground in language families and are thought to have a shared (fairly distant) origin, in a language sub-family, their commonality is more definite. Sub-families are divided into language groups which consist of set of individual languages.
On the map world, there are 12 major language families spatially though Indo European languages are the most widely dispersed family. This family dominates not only in Europe but also in much of Asia, North-South America, Australia and parts of Southern Africa. This family language is spoken by about half of the world’s people with English the most widely used Indo European language.
Geolinguists theorize that a lost language – Proto Indo European existed somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea and that the present languages of Indo-European family evolved from it. As Indo-European speakers dispersed, vocabularies grew and linguistic differentiation took place. Latin arose during this early period and was disseminated over much of Europe during the rise of Roman Empire. Later Latin died out and was supplanted by Italian, French and the other Romance languages.
The Major World languages
Although more of the world’s people speak Indo-European languages than languages in any other family, Chinese is the single most important language in terms of number of speaker with English ranking second. The number of speakers in each family is always taken as approximation. As for example, English is not only spoken by North Americans, Britons, Irish Australians and New Zealanders and millions in smaller population countries but it is also used as a second language in India, Africa and elsewhere. The regional languages of India (Indo European as well as Dravidian) are among the most used, but exact data on number of speakers are not available. In case of Africa, none of the languages spoken, South of Sahara is recognized as major world language. The reasons sorted reveal that African language map is highly fragmented. Sub Sahara area still has relatively smaller population, but more than 1000 languages are spoken here. These languages are grouped in four families – Niger-Congo, Saharan, Sudanic and Khoisan. In terms of number of speakers, Hausa is estimated to be most important sub Saharan African language. Hundreds of African languages have fewer than one million speakers. Among the other language families that are spoken by dwindling, often marginally located or island groups. Austro Asiatic languages, spoken in the interiors locales of eastern India and in Cambodia and Laos, are thought to be survivors of ancient languages spoken before modern invasion and cultural diffusion took place. Khmer and Vietnamese are placed in this family. The Papuan and indigenous Australian languages though numerous and quite diverse are spoken by fewer than 10 million people. The languages of Native Americans remain strong only in areas of Middle America, the high Andes and northern Canada. Languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family survive on the Arctic margins of Greenland, North America and eastern Asia.
The map of world languages avails some of the interesting facts. As for example, the island of Madagascar off the East African Coast has Malagasy language as the prime language spoken. This belongs to Malay-Polynesian family, the language of Indonesia and its neighbours. The language map of Europe clearly shows that the Indo European language family prevails in this region, with pockets of Ural Altaic family occurring in Finland and adjacent areas, Hungary and Turkey, west of sea of Marmora. Sub families include the Germanic languages (English, German, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese), the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech,
Slovak, Ukrainian Slovenian, Serbo Croatian and Bulgarian) and the Celtic languages. Languages groups in Europe are represented by clusters. Though there is strong correlation between the language spoken and the political organization of space, there are some important exceptions. The French linguistic region extends to Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, but in France itself it co-exists with Celtic tongue in Brittany Peninsula. The use of Romanian extends well into Moldavia, Greek and Albania.
Although the overwhelming majority of Europeans and Russians speak Indo European languages, Ural Altaic language family also represents this realm. Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are major languages of this family. African language map reveals families, the largest of which is the Niger Congo family which extends from West Africa to central-South Africa. This family can be sub-divided into five sub families. One of these is Bantu sub family whose languages are spoken by most of the people near equator and south of it. Atlantic, Voltaic, Guinea and Hausa are the other subfamilies, mostly spoken in West Africa. The oldest languages of sub Saharan Africa are Khoisan languages (san spoken by only a few thousand people in south West Africa). Perhaps, the Khoisan languages were once the main language of much of Africa, but they have been reduced to comparative insignificant by Bantu invasion. This also justifies the relation of Bantu with other subfamilies.
