In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community. Yet the residents of each village spoke completely different languages.
According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History , this island, just kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps 40 different indigenous languages. Why so many?
We could ask this same question of the entire globe. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7, distinct languages. And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.
For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely.
Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates. Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions. The questions also seem like they should be fundamental to many academic disciplines — linguistics, anthropology, human geography.
But, starting in , when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.
These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged.
The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical adage — correlation does not equal causation.
We wanted to know the exact steps that led to so many languages forming in certain places and so few in others. But previous work provided few robust theories on the specific processes involved, and the methods used did not get us any closer to understanding the causes of language diversity patterns.
Yes, people can sit down in a room and decide upon a standardized version of a dialect so that large numbers of people can communicate with maximal efficiency—no more clau , clav , and ciav.
Or, yes, the written dialect will have its words collected in dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary does have more words than Archi and Endegen do; the existence of print has allowed English speakers to curate many of their words instead of letting them come and go with time. In popular usage, a language is written in addition to being spoken, while a dialect is just spoken. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe.
Related Video. How you start a conversation with a stranger depends on where you live. It depends on whether we're talking about first- or second-language learning. Native speakers of a language do tend to master some of its sounds before others. In English, p, m, n, h, and w are among the first consonants acquired by children, while z, j, v, and the two th sounds as in think and this are among the last to be mastered. But all of the sounds of a language are generally acquired before puberty by a native speaker.
Typically, it's only non-native learners that have long-term difficulty with a sound. When you learn a second language, you may have difficulty with sounds that don't occur in your native language; for example, some languages have trilled r 's, 'clicks' made with the tongue as air is taken in, or sounds made much farther back in the throat than English sounds.
Surprisingly, though, the hardest sounds to learn may be those that are similar to, but just a bit different from, sounds in your native language.
It seems to be very difficult to overcome the tendency to keep using the familiar sounds from your native language. In this sense, your native language causes 'interference' in your efforts to pick up the new language. Again, it depends on whether we're talking about a first or second language.
Children acquire their native language effortlessly, regardless of the language. Learning another language later on, however, is a different matter. Some languages do have far more complicated word-building rules than others, and others have far more complex sound patterns or sentence structures.
But despite differences in individual areas of a language, researchers have not found any one language or group of languages to be clearly more difficult or complicated in all areas. To some extent, how difficult it is to learn a language depends on how much it has in common with the language or languages that you already speak.
Learning a language that is closely related to your native language can be easier than learning one that is very different.
French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese are all descended from Latin, so they are closely related, and a speaker of one can learn any of the others fairly easily.
Likewise, English, Dutch, and German are closely related, having all descended from an earlier language called Germanic, so it would be relatively easy for an English speaker to learn Dutch or German. But learning a language that's closely related to your native language can also bring problems, because their similarity can result in interference from your native language that would cause you to make mistakes.
A very different language such as Chinese, Turkish, or Mohawk, however, brings additional difficulties. In Chinese, for example, a 'word' is made up not just of consonants and vowels, but also the 'tone', or pitch, with which it is uttered.
This means that the syllable ma uttered with a high tone 'mother' in Mandarin Chinese is a completely different word from ma uttered with a low rising tone 'hemp' , which in turn is a completely different word from ma uttered with a high falling tone 'scold'. The words of such a language are likely to be very difficult for a native English speaker to master. In short, no one language or group of languages can be said to be harder than the rest.
All languages are easy for infants to learn; it's only those of us who grew up speaking something else that find them difficult. Donate Jobs Center News Room. Search form Search.
0コメント