Language is a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understand to have the same meaning.
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i. A language family includes individual languages related through a common ancestor that existed before recorded history.
ii. Languages are of three types: Monosyllabic, Agglutinative and Inflexional.
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Monosyllabic-Words have various meanings depending on the position in sentence-Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Tibetan.
Agglutinative-Words altered by prefixes and suffixes-Malay, Japanese and many African languages.
Inflexional-Flexible, modified to give the required meaning-English, French, other Indo-European language; Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Hindi.
iii. Dialect-Form of language spoken in a local area Several Dialects derived from one language. Language groups include-
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Germanic Languages
West Germanic-English.
North Germanic-Scandinavia (Swedish, Danish, Norweign, Icelandic)
East Germanic-Extinct – Gothic.
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Romance Languages-From Latin by other Romans
Modern Romance-Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian correspond to boundaries of countries.
Indo Iranian languages
Indie-Bangladesh; India and Pakistan; Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Oriya, Sanskrit, Dravidian
Iranian – Persian, Pashtoo, Afghanistani
Balto-Slavic Languages
East Slavic – Russian, Ukrainian, Bylorussian
W and S Slavic – Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian
Other Indo-European languages
Albanian, Armenian, Celtic and Greek,
Sino – Tibetan
Chinese: Mandarin, Cantonese, Characteristics – Collection of 420 one syllable words one sound to denote more than one thing, Method of writing is Ideographic
Japanese: uses phonetic symbols; Korean: Borrowed from Chinese and Japanese; Vietnamese: Largest of SE Asian – Written with Latin alphabet.