about languages

8/9/2019 About Languages

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©Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies language unlimited!

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Have you ever

wondered…how children learn

to speak?

Have you ever

asked…why there are so

many differentlanguages in theworld?

Do you know…

where English

came from?

Have you noticed…

some languages have

many more speakersthan others?

Have you wondered…

how many languages

it is possible to learn?

What do you think?

“Languages belong to everyone;

so most people feel they have aright to have an opinion about it”

What is your opinion?Maybe it will change as you findout more…

Do you agree with

these opinions?

2.The bigger the

language the betterit is

1. Sign language isnot a real language

Do you agree with

these opinions?3. Some languages

are more beautifulthan others

4. Grammar tells ushow to writecorrectly

So many questions!

There are many different

questions about language.Here are some answers…can you match them up?

1. What is the most

polite language?

A. KoreanB. Turkish

C. Chinese

Answer:

There are 7 levels of politeness which are used

to show respect to theaddressee.

A. Korean

2. What is the oldest

writing system still inuse?

A. KoreanB. Turkish

C. Chinese

This dates from around1200 BC and although it

has changed since then itis still used by millions of people.

Answer: C. Chinese

3. What seems to be the

loudest language?

A. KoreanB. Turkish

C. Chinese

This was measured in astudy in 1970 which set

out to measure speakersover various distances.

Answer: B. Turkish

4. What is said to be the

most frequently spokenword on the planet?

A. TheB. OK

C. ilunga

Answer:

First coined as a joke inBoston newspapers andmeaning oll korrekt (aconscious misspelling of "allcorrect") it is now commonlyused and understoodworldwide.

5. What is said to be the

most frequently word inEnglish?

A. TheB. OK

C. ilunga

This is number one in thetop 10 most frequent

words in British English-as measured in theBritish National Corpus.

Answer: A. The

6. What is considered to

be the hardest word totranslate?

A. The?B. OK?

C. ilunga?

A person who is ready toforgive any abuse for the

first time,to tolerate it a second time,but never a third.

Answer: C. ilunga

*‘ilunga’ comes from the language Tshiluba spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo

What would have

happened if you hadn’tlearnt to speak as a child?

Evidence from discoveriesof ‘wild children’ suggestthat if you hadn’t learntyour first language by theage of 13 you probablywouldn’t be able to learnafter that.

How many languages is it

possible for one personto learn?

If you have the timeany number!The most multilingualperson still living isZiad Fazah who speaks58 languages.

Ziad Fazah speaks all

these languages:Albanian German Amharic Arabic Armenian Azeri Bengali Burmese Bulgarian Cambodian Cantonese

Mandarin Wu Sinhalese Singapore English Korean Danish Dzongkha Spanish Finnish French Fijian Greek Hebrew Hindi Dutch Hungarian Indonesian English Icelandic Italian Japanese Swahili Lao Malay Malagasy Mongolian Nepali Norwegian

Papiamento Persian Polish Portuguese Pashto Kyrgyz Romanian Russian Serbo-Croatian Swedish Tajik Thai Czech Tibetan Turkish Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese

What makes a word

beautiful?No word is inherently

more beautiful thananother.In polls it is often the

sound, meaning or theconnotation of a wordthat makes it beautiful.

What makes a word

beautiful?For example:

mother (English)Rhabarbermarmelade(rhubarb jam in German)

sommarvind(summer breezein Swedish)

Does size matter?

There are over 6,000

languages in the world, somewith lots of speakers and somewith very few speakers, some are

in remote places and somestretch across the whole world.

1. What is the BIGGEST

language in the world(most speakers)

A. English?B. Burumakok?

C. MandarinChinese?

Answer:

This is generallyagreed to top the list

of most speakers withsome 880 million firstlanguage speakers

C. Mandarin

2. What is one of thesmallest language in theworld (fewest speakers)

C. MandarinChinese?

Answer:

Burumakok, in WestPapua New Guinea, is

spoken by fewer than300 people

B. Burumankok

3. Which is the richest

language

C. MandarinChinese?

Answer:

English is spoken as afirst language by the

wealthiest economies

A. English

4. Which language has

the most sounds?

A. English?B. !Xũ?

C. Kâte

Answer:

!Xũ is an African languagewhich has 141 phonemes

(a unit of sound thatdistinguishes meanings of words) including a largenumber of clicks

B. !Xũ

5. Which language is the

most widespread?

A. English?B. !Xũ?

C. Kâte

Answer:

28% of the world’s landarea is occupied by

countries having Englishas their official language

A. English

6. Which language has the

highest percentage of second language speakers

A. English?B. !Xũ?

C. Kâte

Answer:

93% of speakers of thislanguage spoken in New

Guinea are secondlanguage speakers

C. Kâte

Fact or fiction?

Many popular ‘facts’ aboutlanguage are not necessarily true

and many are still in dispute.

Here are some ‘facts’

about language, can youspot which are true?

Answer true or falseHint, some may be both!

Languages can

be dangerous!

True: Esperanto is an inventedlanguage that was banned in

several countries by authoritarianregimes e.g. Nazi Germany,Soviet Union, China.

TrueTrue

Languages can be

bought and sold

True: in Vanuatu (South Pacificisland) a community sold their

language to their neighboursand couldn’t use it any more!

TrueTrue

Languages never

change

False: languages change all thetime borrowing from each other,

making up new words (as newthings are invented), losingothers as they go out of fashion!

True False

Languages can

True: about 417 languages areunder threat of extinction which

means that they don’t havechildren among their speakers.

TrueTrue

Languages can

True: big languages can kill smallerones by being the language of education or by their speakers being

more economically powerful.English, Spanish, Portuguese arethe biggest killers!

TrueTrue

You can’t just

make up a newlanguageFalse

False: new languages have been created,the most successful of these being Esperanto(an international language created in 1887).

Klingon was made up for a TV programme.Do you know which one?

True False

Languages have

relatives

True and false: most languages are relatedto other languages. There are 30 differentlanguage families — English belongs to theIndo-European family.

Basque (spoken in Spain) can’t be traced toany family — it is known as an isolate.

True FalseTrue

Animals can’t

learn to speak

True and false: chimps have been taughtsome language (especially sign language) butthey don’t have the ability to pronouncehuman language.

Birds can mimic human sounds e.g. parrotsand lyrebirds, but they don’t understand whatthey are saying.

TrueTrue False

Languages can

solve crimes

True: criminals have been identifiedfrom their writing or speech. Forexample, the uncle of a murdered

teenager was identified as her killer bytext messages he sent from her phone(pretending to be her).

TrueTrue

English is the

easiest languageto learnFalse

True and false: it is a matter of opinion only. English has been

variously voted both easiest andhardest to learn.

True FalseTrue

Eskimos have up

to 400 words forsnowFalse

False: this is known as the Great EskimoVocabulary Hoax which grew from asuggestion that there were four or more words

for snow and the number kept getting bigger!There are probably no more than 15 words infact and English has nearly that many!

True False

Not all languages

have separate wordsfor ‘he’ and ‘she’

True: Finnish ‘hän’ covers heand she and most African

languages don’t make thedistinction.

TrueTrue

And there is much,

much moreAs you can see languages are abig and interesting subject tostudy.And it is not just about learningnew languages. It’s about findingthe answers to many morequestions about language.

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