2235 Language Families PDF

Topic Subtopic
Literature & Language Linguistics
Language Families
of the World
Course Guidebook
Professor John McWhorter

Columbia University
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Language Families of the World
PROFESSOR BIOGRAPHY
John McWhorter, PhD

Associate Professor of English
and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
J
ohn McWhorter is an Associate Professor
of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University, where he teaches
courses on linguistics, Western civilization,
American studies, and music history. He
earned his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford
University, and he has taught at both Cornell
University and the University of California,
Berkeley. His academic specialties are
language change and language contact.
Dr. McWhorter is the author of numerous books, including The Power of

Babel: A Natural History of Language; Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation
of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care; Our Magnificent
Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English; What Language Is: And What
It Isn’t and What It Could Be; The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the
Same in Any Language; Words on the Move: Why English Won’t—and Can’t—Sit
Still (Like, Literally); and Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths about America’s
Lingua Franca. He has also written a book on dialects and Black English,
Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a “Pure” Standard English; four
books on Creole languages; and an academic linguistics book entitled
Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language
Grammars. Dr. McWhorter hosts Slate’s podcast Lexicon Valley and is a
contributing editor to The Atlantic and The New Republic.
In addition to his work in linguistics, Dr. McWhorter is the author of

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America; Authentically Black: Essays
for the Black Silent Majority; and Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in
Black America. He appears regularly on bloggingheads.tv and has written
on race and cultural issues for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The
i
PROFESSOR BIOGRAPHY
New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wall Street Journal,
the Los Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, Ebony, and Vibe. He has
provided commentaries for All Things Considered and has appeared on Meet
the Press, Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, The Colbert Report, Book TV’s
In Depth, Talk of the Nation, TODAY, Good Morning America, The NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer, and Fresh Air.
Dr. McWhorter’s other Great Courses are The Story of Human Language;
Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language; Myths, Lies, and Half-
Truths of Language Usage; and Language A to Z.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Introduction
Professor Biography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Typographical Conventions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
Course Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Guides
1 Why Are There So Many Languages? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2 The First Family Discovered: Indo-European. . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3 Indo-European Languages in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4 Indo-European Languages in Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

5 The Click Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6 Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
QUIZ FOR LECTURES 1–6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
7 Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
8 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond I . . . . . . . . . . . 34
9 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond II. . . . . . . . . . . 38
10 Nilo-Saharan: Africa’s Hardest Languages?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
11 Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe?. . . . . . . . . . . . 45
12 How to Identify a Language Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
QUIZ FOR LECTURES 7–12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
13 What Is a Caucasian Language?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
14 Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European. . . . . . . . . . . . 59
15 Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
16 Japanese and Korean: Alike yet Unrelated. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
17 The Languages We Call Chinese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
18 Chinese’s Family Circle: Sino-Tibetan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
QUIZ FOR LECTURES 13–18. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
19 Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
20 Languages of the South Seas I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
21 Languages of the South Seas II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
22 Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
23 Creole Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
24 Why Are There So Many Languages in New Guinea?. . . . . . . 108
QUIZ FOR LECTURES 19–24. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
25 The Languages of Australia I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
26 The Languages of Australia II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
27 The Original American Languages I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
28 The Original American Languages II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
29 The Original American Languages III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
30 The Original American Languages IV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
31 Languages Caught between Families. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
32 How Far Back Can We Trace Languages?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
33 What Do Genes Say about Language Families?. . . . . . . . . . . 150
34 Language Families and Writing Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Supplementary Material
Quiz Answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Image Credits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
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v
TYPOGRAPHICAL CONVENTIONS
Typographical Conventions
This guidebook uses the following typographical conventions:
¯¯ Italics are used for foreign-language words and for words cited as
words (rather than used functionally; e.g., The word ginormous is a
combination of gigantic and enormous).
¯¯ Single quotation marks are used for meanings of words (e.g., Wife
meant ‘woman’ in Old English).
¯¯ Double quotation marks are used for pronunciations of words (e.g., “the
other” versus “t’other”) and words used in a special sense (e.g., The
“secret lives” of words are fascinating).
¯¯ Slashes are used to indicate sounds (e.g., /b/).
vi
COURSE SCOPE
T
his course is dedicated to languages throughout the world, from the
Indo-European languages that are likely familiar to the relatively
obscure language isolates that belong to no particular family. Along
with the Indo-European languages and language isolates, the course also
looks at the languages of Africa, the Chinese languages, the languages of
Papua New Guinea and Australia, Paleosiberian languages, Japanese and
Korean, the languages of the South Seas, and more.
Aside from looking at features of the languages themselves, the course

describes successes and difficulties linguists have had in studying such
disparate groups. By the end of the course, the instructor hopes to leave
you with these four takeaways:
1 The structures used by European languages are but one of many

game plans through which humans can express themselves
linguistically. The course looks at some of those many other setups,
which are both interesting and successful.
2 European languages are in no way more sophisticated or modern

than other languages. If anything, many other languages can seem
more elaborate than European languages.
3 Language is always changing, and the distribution of today’s families

shows this. Formerly, there were doubtless many more language
families than today. The vast swaths of land that some language
families now cover, speckled with smaller ones here and there, reflect
the remnants of what was once more of a patchwork quilt.
4 That kind of change continues today, as ever more minority

languages are no longer passed on to children. One of the most
urgent tasks of modern linguists is to document what is left—that
is, to record the diversity of the past as we move on to a more
homogenous future.
1
LECTURE 1
Why Are There

So Many Languages?
There are 7,000 languages in the world,

and all likely developed from a single,
initial source. This lecture looks at theories
on the origins of language, how so many
languages came to be, and what led to
differences between them.
2
Lecture 1 Why Are There So Many Languages?
Theories on the Spread of Language

¯¯ One theory on the emergence of human language surmises that it
emerged multiple times, but this is uneconomical: Researchers do
not propose that other species-wide traits arose several times, and no
groups of non-speaking humans have been discovered.
¯¯ It has also been proposed that language arose when humans made
a leap into cultural sophistication. This is typically linked to the
emergence of tools and art, and thus is now dated to the humans whose
fossils have been found at the Blombos Cave in South Africa dating to
100,000 years ago.
¯¯ However, remains of Homo sapiens now date back as far as 300,000

years. If Homo sapiens have been in existence for 300,000 years,
language may essentially be that old as well, especially given that
language is a species-wide trait, and no human groups now are
language-less.
THE PETROGLYPHS OF WADI RUM

DATE BACK OVER 12,000 YEARS.
3
The Morphing of Sounds

¯¯ When one group of humans splits off from another one, their versions
of the language start drifting apart until they are no longer the same
language. This fundamental changeability of language is difficult
to detect within a lifespan, but each generation pronounces sounds
slightly differently until a complete transformation has occurred.
¯¯ Take, for example, sound changes, as in the word sock. It has three
sounds: /s/, /ah/, and /k/. All three naturally change into different ones
over time.
ww An /s/ can become /sh/, which can become /zh/, which can then
become /z/.
ww An /ah/ can become an /aw/, which can become an /oo/, which can then
become /u/.
ww A /k/ can become a /kh/, which can then drop away completely.
¯¯ The combined effect of all of these changes in the word sock could be
that sock morphs into shawk, then zhoo, and then the French-sounding
jue. Notice that jue is a completely different word from sock.
The Morphing of Materials and Meaning

¯¯ While sounds can change, words can also come together to create
prefixes, suffixes, and new words entirely. For example, the suffix -ly
emerged from the separate word like, as in, slow-like becoming slowly.
¯¯ With the passage of time, prefixes and suffixes can lose meaning and
qualify as new material that constitutes the words in a language that
distinguish it from others.
¯¯ Additionally, words’ meanings can drift into new ones over time. The
words merry, bra, and pretzel all trace back to one original word in
English’s distant ancestor that meant ‘short.’
4
The Language Family Tree

¯¯ As humans have spread throughout the world, languages have
proliferated into families.
ww Roughly speaking, the Indo-European family covers most of Europe
and extends into Asia.
ww Africa has four main families.
ww Asia has the Altaic family (including Turkish and many others)
stretching across it, plus a cluster in the east and southeast that includes
Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai.
ww The Austronesian family covers parts of Southeast Asia and out into the
Pacific; it includes Indonesian, Tagalog, Maori, and Hawaiian.
ww Australia is home to two major families, while the island of New
Guinea alone has about 25.
ww In the New World, there are roughly 10 families of Native American
languages in North America, 7 in Mexico and Central America, and
about 15 more in South America.
5
ww There are many additional families. The click languages comprise three
families. The Georgian language is Caucasian, which covers three more.
There are isolates everywhere, such as Basque, which has no relatives and
must be the last living member of a now-extinct family.
¯¯ These families are fascinatingly distinct from one another. For

example, the click languages of Africa use the clicks as integral sounds,
just like consonants and vowels. In North America, in many languages,
everything in a sentence can be contained in a single word.
¯¯ Some languages in North America have no regular verbs, as is the case

with Navajo, while some languages in Australia have only three verbs,
such as do, go, and come.
Learning from the Language Families

¯¯ The language families of the world have much to teach about the past,
present, and future of humanity. Navajo and its relative languages
are similar to a small group of languages in Siberia, which helps
researchers trace Native American peoples to a migration from Asia.
¯¯ The Basque language in France and Spain is unrelated to any other

language and sits surrounded by languages all from another family.
That is a clue that languages related to Basque once spread across
much more of Europe, and by extension, a whole different genetic
group of people. Genetic research concurs with this hypothesis.
¯¯ The languages of Polynesia

are so similar that they
almost seem like variations
SUGGESTED READING of the same language.
This means that they
Bernard, Matthews, and Polinsky, haven’t been separate for
The Atlas of Languages. very long, and indeed, all
Pereltsvaig, Languages of evidence shows that these
the World. were the final areas of the
world occupied by humans.
6
LECTURE 2
The First Family Discovered:

Indo-European
The Indo-European language family includes

almost all of the languages of Europe and
many spoken in Asia. In Europe, the Romance,
Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic languages are
Indo-European, as are Albanian, Greek, and
the Baltic languages of Lithuania and Latvia.
Only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian,
and the Saami language are of other families.
In Asia, Armenian, the languages of Iran,
and most of the languages of India are Indo-
European. This lecture provides an overview
of the discovery of these languages and their
characteristics.
7
Lecture 2 The First Family Discovered: Indo-European
The Discovery of Indo-European Languages

¯¯ Indo-European was not the first group of languages that were noticed
to be related. However, it is the first family that was the subject of
extensive classification-minded research, which was the foundation
of what became modern linguistics. The family is also especially well
known because so many of its languages are extensively written and
have been for a long time.
¯¯ A widespread account of its emergence is that William Jones initiated

Indo-European studies with an announcement before the Asiatic
Society in 1786. However, though Jones’s statement had the most
influence, the first person to make an equivalent proposal had been
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn in 1647. He proposed that Dutch,
German, Latin, Greek, Persian, Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic all had an
ancestor he called Scythian.
Characteristics of Indo-European Languages

¯¯ A typical Indo-European language is similar to Latin. It divides
components into subjects and objects. It has case suffixes on nouns,
with meanings that mostly correspond to separate words in English:
Latin: Puer dat rosa-m puell-ae man-u.
English: The boy gives a rose to the girl by hand.
¯¯ A typical Indo-European language also separates verbs into different

conjugation classes and marks the person and number with suffixes. Indo-
European languages are strict about marking elements like case, plurality,
or definiteness. Many languages in the world can leave such elements to
context to a degree that most Indo-European languages do not.
¯¯ Note that while it is typical for Indo-European languages to be much

like Latin, not all fall under the same general umbrella. For example,
some languages, like English and French, have lost many of the
original suffixes.
8
Reconstruction of the Original

Indo-European Language
¯¯ Linguists have compared the living Indo-European languages
and the ones that now survive only in writing, such as Latin, Old
Persian, and Sanskrit. Using tendencies they have seen in how
sounds change, linguists have traced backward to reconstruct what
the father language, or Proto-Indo-European, would have been like.
For example, linguists know that the Proto-Indo-European word for
‘father’ was pǝter by tracing backward from the corresponding word for
‘father’ in several languages.
¯¯ Thousands of words have been reconstructed, as well as what many

of the original suffixes would have been. Thus, linguists can even
speculate about whole sentences. Linguists believe that Proto-Indo-
European was a language where the verb came last, rather than in the
middle of a sentence. Such reconstructions, which are being done of
many language families, can only be approximate.
9
¯¯ The Proto-Indo-European language was not written. Some scholars

think Proto-Indo-European would have been spoken in what is today
Turkey and traces back to roughly 7000 BCE. However, this idea is
losing influence, and most researchers now think that the original
language was spoken by the Yamna people of what is today southern
Ukraine from c. 4000 BCE.
¯¯ There are two genetic markers that are present in Yamna skeletons and
also in Europeans and South Asians, suggesting that a people migrated
both westward and eastward. Genetic and archaeological evidence
suggests that Yamna men in particular migrated west and mixed with
local women starting around 3500 BC, imposing their culture and
language in waves.
The Indo-European Language Today

¯¯ Today, of the world’s 7.5 billion people, about 3 billion speak Indo-
European languages. Of the world’s largest 20 languages, 10 are Indo-
European: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hindi,
Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Russian.
¯¯ This dominance includes the entire Western Hemisphere. The

languages’ ubiquitous nature came about in large part because of the
historical dominance of a few European countries as well as the success
of Indo-Aryan people after their migration into South Asia.
SUGGESTED READING
Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.

Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture.
10
LECTURE 3
Indo-European
Languages in Europe
The Indo-European languages of

Europe reveal much about how different
languages evolve. This lecture looks at
quirks and interesting historical facts about
the Germanic languages, the Romance
languages, the Balto-Slavic languages,
Albanian, and others.
11
Lecture 3 Indo-European Languages in Europe
The Germanic Languages

¯¯ The Germanic languages include German, English, Dutch, Swedish,
Norwegian, and Danish, among others. The Germanic group dates
back to the language spoken by the Goths, and in general, the
languages are related to peoples of the northern part of Europe.
¯¯ Some Germanic-language quirks show up in present-day English.

Take this line of written dialogue, for example:
“We need to find some beaver pelts,” said Melvin.
¯¯ It is very unlikely an English speaker would utter “said Melvin” in

speech, yet that construction is often present in written English. The
root of this quirk is that in Germanic languages, everything revolves
around the verb. In the above example, the verb remains in what is
known as the second position.
GREEK AND THE CELTIC LANGUAGES:

THEN AND NOW
The Greek language presents an interesting status contrast

between past and present. It was once widespread from Egypt
to the fringes of India and served as the high language of the
Roman Empire. Today, however, only 13 million people speak it.
Like Greek, the Celtic languages were once more widespread.

Mummies discovered in Hami in what is now China wore the
exact same cloth patterns as did Celts in what is now Austria
in Europe, as well as plaid and twill, which first emerged in the
Caucasus area. These mummies were tall with blonde hair, as
Romans described Celts.
12
The Romance Languages

¯¯ The Romance languages descended from
Latin. There are roughly 36 of them, and
they include French, Spanish, and Italian.
The Romance languages offer interesting
examples of how words evolve. Take, for
example, Romance variations for the word
key, shown below. They all spawned from
the original Latin word clavis.
LANGUAGE KEY
Franco-Provençal clâ
French clé
Occitan clau
Catalan clau
Spanish llave
Romansch clav
Piedmontese ciav
Romagnol cêv
Italian chiave
Sicilian chiavi
Sardinian ciae
Portuguese chave
Romanian cheie
Aromanian cljai
Istriot ciave
13
QUIRKS OF ALBANIAN
Albanian shows that mixed vocabulary is normal and not solely

a quirk of English. It contains so many words from Latin, Greek,
Slavic, and Turkish that it was the last branch of the Indo-
European languages discovered.
The Balto-Slavic Language Family

¯¯ The Balto-Slavic language family includes languages that are very
difficult to master for non-native speakers. Its sub-branches are Slavic
and the smaller Baltic branch, which includes Lithuanian and Latvian.
¯¯ Languages like Russian include a great deal of sub-rules and

irregularities amidst their basic complexity. Another example of this
group’s complexity comes from the tones present in Lithuanian. For
example, káltas with a falling tone means ‘chisel,’ while kãltas with a
rising tone means ‘guilty.’
¯¯ Additionally, a dialect continuum is present in the South Slavic

languages. For instance, on the Dalmatian coast, the word meaning
‘industrious’ is vridan. In western Bulgaria, the similar term vredan
means ‘industrious’ or ‘harmful,’ while in southeastern Bulgaria,
vraedan means ‘harmful.’
SUGGESTED READING
Barber, The Mummies of Urumchi.

Ostler, Empires of the Word.
14
LECTURE 4
Indo-European
Languages in Asia
One-fifth to one-sixth of the world speaks

one of the Indo-European languages of
India. These languages are the children
of Sanskrit, which was once thought to be
essentially Proto-Indo-European itself. This
lecture looks at facts about and traits of
several of the Indo-European languages
spoken in Asia.
15
Lecture 4 Indo-European Languages in Asia
Contact and the Dravidian Languages

¯¯ One Indo-European subset, the modern Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi,
Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and Romani), can seem
oddly unlike the European languages they are related to. Much of this
is because languages affect one another through contact. At one point,
there was a completely different group of languages, the Dravidian
languages, spoken in India. Today, they’re spoken mostly in the
southern part of India, but they used to be more widespread.
¯¯ Speakers of early Indo-European

languages, such as Sanskrit, met these
Dravidian-speaking peoples. This
led to an interesting result in that the
resulting Indo-Aryan languages now
seem very different from other Indo-
European languages. That is because
Dravidian speakers in the region
seasoned Dravidian with elements of
the languages of the new people they
had encountered.
The Indo-Iranian Languages

¯¯ The Indo-Iranian group, falling under the Indo-European umbrella,
covers several dozen languages, including Persian. A notable example
of the Old Persian language is found on the Behistun Inscription in
Iran, which boasts of the greatness of King Darius.
¯¯ Like many Indo-European ENGLISH PERSIAN

languages, Old Persian had I buy mi-xar-am
many case and conjugational you buy mi-xar-i
endings. Modern Persian is he/she/it buys mi-xar-ad
much like English in being more we buy mi-xar-im
streamlined, as shown in the you folks buy mi-xar-id
example translations at right. they buy mi-xar-and
16
¯¯ Many of the simpler Indo-European languages like modern Persian

and English are less complex because they were largely learned by
adults. Their atrophied language-learning abilities shaved away much
of their unnecessary complexities.
¯¯ There were other ancient Iranian languages, such as Sogdian, which

shows how starkly the global significance of a language can change
across history. Sogdian was for a time the lingua franca of the Silk
Road, but today is represented by a small language called Yaghnobi
in Tajikistan.
¯¯ Modern Persian demonstrates the lack of fit between labels and

languages, as well as how hopeless it is to starkly distinguish a
language from a dialect. The Persian language is called Dari in
Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. One dialect of
Tajik is Bukharan or Bukhori, a Hebrew-influenced variety, spoken by
Jews mostly in Uzbekistan but also Israel and the US.
¯¯ Pashto is the most conservative Indo-Iranian variety. It has been

recounted as especially challenging for English speakers serving in the
military in Afghanistan.
The Armenian Subfamily

¯¯ Armenian is another Indo-European subfamily spoken in Asia. It
wasn’t discovered to be its own branch until 1877 because it has so
many Iranian words that only about 450 original ones remain.
¯¯ Its sound changes have been unusually deep. For example, the numbers
one to seven are mek, yerku, yereq, chors, hing, vets, and yoth. These are
quite unlike the numbers in Germanic and Romance languages, as
well as early Indo-European languages like Latin and Sanskrit.
17
The Anatolian Languages

¯¯ The Anatolian languages have an interesting story. In Turkey, starting
just after the turn of the 20th century, documents were found in the
earliest known evidence of Indo-European languages. They dated from
as far back as the 16th century BCE. They are a test of Proto-Indo-
European reconstruction.
¯¯ Studies on Hittite confirmed linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s

speculation that Proto-Indo-European had certain lost laryngeal
sounds. He noted that most reconstructed verbs had three sounds:
a consonant, a vowel, and a consonant, in that order. De Saussure
proposed that those long vowels had begun as a throaty consonant that
had then become an extension of the vowel that came before it.
¯¯ Since the Anatolian languages are the oldest, one might expect their
endings to be like Sanskrit’s, yet they aren’t. Hittite has many fewer
tenses and no dual marking, where there are special markers for two of
something as opposed to several.
¯¯ It may be that the Anatolian languages simply shed all of this material
for some reason. A more likely explanation is that the Anatolian
languages represent what Proto-Indo-European was originally like and
that it only took the Sanskrit route in a later branch.
SUGGESTED READING
Dalby, Dictionary of Languages.

Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture.
18
LECTURE 5
The Click Languages
It is possible (although not certain) that the

first humans spoke a language which later
proliferated into today’s click languages,
although language change means
that today’s click languages would be
nothing like that first language. The formal
name of the click languages is Khoisan,
named after the San people (hunter-
gatherers) and the Khoi (pastoralists).
They are spoken in southern Africa. They
number a few dozen, and most are highly
endangered.
19
Lecture 5 The Click Languages
The Clicks
¯¯ The clicks themselves are not DENTAL | (from teeth)
decorations, but actual normal
sounds. There are five basic click ALVEOLAR ! (tss)
types, written with particular PALATAL ǂ (tsk)
symbols (shown at right).
LATERAL ǁ (ckhl)
¯¯ They make the difference in BILABIAL ʘ (kiss)
meaning between words just
as the letters b, p, and c make
the difference between bat, pat, and cat. The clicks are pronounced
in combination with regular consonants, allowing a wider range
of sounds than in a language like English. The clicks can also be
pronounced pushing out or breathing in.
¯¯ This functionality means that some of the Khoisan languages have

the most sounds of any language in the world. One dialect of the !Xõo
language has 43 clicks and 44 other consonants, while English has only
about 30 consonants. The clicks leave a scar in the throat of speakers,
which develops in children at an early age.
Branches of the Khoisan Languages

¯¯ There is no real evidence that the click languages emerged from a
single original one, unlike in the Indo-European family. Other than
the clicks, there are only four words that the languages mostly have
in common that could be traced to single original forms: the words
for chin, lungs, throat, and wound. This could be due to speakers of
the languages exchanging words over time rather than all of them
being related.
¯¯ The Khoisan languages actually divide into three families with

different grammatical patterns: The northern one is something like
Chinese, the central one is something like a European language with
gender endings, and the southern group is something different again.
20
Emergence of the Clicks

¯¯ It is difficult question to determine how the clicks emerged, as these
languages are not written, and thus, linguists cannot see their origins
in written form. Some have speculated that the clicks were first used as
hunting calls, but this seems unlikely given that the clicks would alert
the animals to humans’ presence.
¯¯ However, there are two other cases of clicks in the world that suggest
that the clicks emerged first as features in an alternate avoidance form
of language. The only other click language that has emerged outside
of southern Africa is in Australia, a variety of the Daman language
used only with mothers-in-law. Clicks are also common in languages
of a different family spoken in proximity to Khoisan, including various
Bantu languages such as Zulu and Xhosa.
21
¯¯ In these languages, there is a practice called hlonipha, in which a

woman does not pronounce her in-laws’ names, or even syllables
associated with those names. There are many ways people create
hlonipha words, such as deleting a consonant. For example, in Xhosa,
“I don’t want” is andifuni and could become andi-uni. One of the ways
is to replace a sound with a click sound; for instance, the word that
means ‘swing,’ lenga, is pronounced “|enga” with the dental click.
¯¯ It is reasonable to suppose that these Bantu languages adopted clicks

from Khoisan languages as an avoidance strategy as in Australia. Since
then, however, the clicks have become part of normal language as
well. One piece of evidence supporting this hypothesis is that hlonipha
is used most extensively in the Bantu languages that have the most
click sounds.
The World’s First Languages?

¯¯ Evidence exists that the Khoisan languages may have been the world’s
first. Two groups of click speakers are divergent genetically by 70,000
years, which is when humans first left Africa.
¯¯ It is reasonable to reconstruct that the clicks were present 70,000 years

ago: That they only arose elsewhere for an unusual purpose and then
were adapted by Bantu languages for that same purpose suggests that
they would have emerged for a similar purpose in Khoisan itself. Since
the hunter-gatherer lifestyle has been unchanged for tens of thousands
of years, researchers might suppose that conditions at the root of their
existence created the clicks.
¯¯ Click languages were once more widespread in the region. There are
two languages with clicks spoken quite far from the Khoisan area,
which suggests that Bantu languages spread southward and eliminated
what once were a larger number of click languages.
22
¯¯ There are also other languages in Tanzania of a different family that

don’t have clicks. However, they do have some words from a nearby
click language for basic terms like the numbers four and five and the
word for boy, suggesting that speakers of such languages once had
wider influence on other people and their speech.
SUGGESTED READING
Suzman, Affluence without Abundance.

Vossen, The Khoesan Languages.
23
LECTURE 6
Niger-Congo:
Largest Family in Africa I
Although some Indo-European languages

diverge from the proto-language more
than others, all of them are, with a certain
amount of examination, identifiably
variations on a pattern. This is not true
of the Niger-Congo family in Africa. The
Niger-Congo family comprises almost all
of the languages native to Africa below
the Sahara, and the majority on and
considerably inward of the upper West
African coast.
24
Lecture 6 Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa I
Overview of Niger-Congo Languages

¯¯ There are about 1,500 Niger-Congo languages by some counts. There
are certainly 1,000, and perhaps 1 in 13 people worldwide speak a
Niger-Congo language. They range from languages that can pack a
whole sentence into one word to others that have very short words and
use tones, very much like Chinese.
¯¯ All of these languages trace back to a single proto-language, which has

not been reconstructed in the detail that Proto-Indo-European has.
It may have been spoken about 15,000 years ago. Only in the 1950s
did anthropologist and linguist Joseph Greenberg classify all of these
languages as belonging to one family.
25
¯¯ In many Niger-Congo languages, such as Swahili, there are genders

as in European languages, but in greater numbers. For example,
Swahili nouns are marked for gender with a prefix (not a suffix),
which is different according to eight features. Then, each prefix has a
plural form.
¯¯ Noun class prefixes also occur on adjectives and demonstratives as

well, just as in languages like Spanish. This feature is traced to the
proto-language because many of these prefixes are present in different
forms in languages across the family.
¯¯ Additionally, even in the languages

that are grammatically like FONGBE ENGLISH
Chinese and don’t have prefixes,
nù drink
there are some vestigial semi-
ò-nù mouth
prefixes, such as in the Fongbe
kú die
language. These are ghosts of an
ò-kú corpse
earlier stage when these languages
sá crawl
still had the original prefixes.
à-sá leg
Swahili
¯¯ Swahili is the most widely known Niger-Congo language. It is spoken
widely in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, and a few other East African countries. It began as an obscure
coastal language, but amidst trade with Arabs, it was chosen as the
African language of trade.
¯¯ There is evidence for this trade as far back as the 2nd century CE.
A few of Swahili’s number terms are borrowed from Arabic (such as
sita, meaning ‘six;’ saba, meaning ‘seven;’ and tisa, meaning ‘nine’) as
well as many other words. Because Swahili has been used as a second
language and as a language of trade for so many people, it is less
difficult than other languages in its subfamily.
26
The Bantu Subfamily

¯¯ Swahili is a member of the largest subfamily of Niger-Congo
languages, Bantu, with about 500 languages. Bantu languages are also
typical of many Niger-Congo languages in having prefixes to mark
person and number just as Romance languages do, but also to mark
verb tenses.
¯¯ Most Bantu languages below the Sahara are quite similar to Swahili in
their grammatical plans. However, in the northwestern Bantu region,
in Nigeria and Cameroon, the languages are much more different from
one another.
¯¯ This shows that the Bantu subgroup emerged in this area because the
languages have had longer to become different from one another. The
similarity of the languages farther south shows that they have not been
there as long. This joins the spotty distribution of the click languages to
show that Bantu speakers overran southern Africa relatively recently.
¯¯ The Pygmy people of central Africa also once spoke languages now
extinct; Bantu overran them as well. Scholars know this because many
of their words for natural phenomena are different from any Bantu (or
other Niger-Congo) words, and are thus remnants of languages they
once spoke. In the same way, an earlier stage of Niger-Congo likely
overran many other languages northward as well.
SUGGESTED READING
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Heine and Nurse, eds., African Languages.
27
QUIZ FOR LECTURES 1–6
QUIZ
LECTURES 1–6
1 How many main language families does CLICK to navigate.

Africa have? [1]
To go back to the page you came from, PRESS Alt + ← on a PC or

⌘ + ← on a Mac. On a tablet, use the bookmarks panel.
2 Is Australia or New Guinea home to more language families? [1]
3 What was the Proto-Indo-European word meaning ‘father’? [2]
4 Was the Proto-Indo-European language written? [2]
5 From what language did the Romance languages descend? [3]
6 What factors make the Balto-Slavic languages difficult to master? [3]
28
7 Who is the subject of the Behistun Inscription? [4]
8 Why are languages learned by adults less complex? [4]
9 What is the formal name of the click languages? [5]
10 How many basic click types are there? [5]
11 In the 1950s, who was responsible for classifying the Niger-Congo

languages as one family? [6]
12 What is the most widely known Niger-Congo language? [6]
CLICK to navigate.
See page 162 for answers.
29
LECTURE 7
Niger-Congo:
Largest Family in Africa II
The Niger-Congo family demonstrates

some of the different language outcomes
that can result from the same original
materials. This lecture looks at a diverse
array of Niger-Congo languages,
including the approaches used by Fula,
Swahili, and other languages. The lecture
also discusses the ongoing work being
undertaken to classify Niger-Congo
languages.
30
Lecture 7 Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa II
The Fula Approach

¯¯ The Fula language, spoken in many West African countries, has as
many as 20 genders, most of which do not correspond to anything
like shape, personhood, or sex. On top of this, within each gender,
the suffix changes shape from noun to
noun. In the class of round things, with
FULA ENGLISH
orange the suffix is -re, but with other
words in this class, the suffix takes other leemuu-re orange
shapes (see table). loo-nde jar
tummu-de calabash
¯¯ When adjectives are used, they often
take a different suffix shape than the
noun. For example, leemuu-re mau-nde means ‘big orange.’ Additionally,
adding a plural suffix changes the first sound of the word: gor-ko means
‘man,’ while wor-be means ‘men.’ A Fula speaker must know which
noun class a word belongs to, what shape of the suffix to use, and how
the word’s first sound might change when they add something to it.
31
Other Elements of Niger-Congo Languages

¯¯ Some Niger-Congo languages, like Swahili, keep each unit of meaning
separate instead of having long words containing multiple elements
of meaning. However, in the Fon language of Togo and Benin, each
concept gets a word to itself, which is how
Chinese works.
FON ENGLISH
¯¯ Most Niger-Congo languages use tone gbà break
(Swahili and Fula are rare exceptions). gbǎ build
However, the languages that keep words xù sea
short use it more heavily, as Chinese does. xú bone
In Fon, just the tone makes the difference in
meaning between words.
EDO ENGLISH
¯¯ The tones can even indicate grammar.
In the Edo language of Benin, using ì mà I show
a different tone is the way to change a í mà I am showing
verb’s tense. ì má I showed
¯¯ In the Bambara language of West Africa, a difference in tone makes

the difference English makes with the words the and a. For example, bá
means ‘a river’ and bâ means ‘the river.’
¯¯ From a European perspective, it can seem as if a language that lacks

lists of suffixes and prefixes is somehow simple. However, languages
that don’t mark gender, case, and conjugation can be complex in
other ways. For example, the Yoruba language of Nigeria has several
different verbs meaning ‘to be,’ while English has only one.
Family Classification
¯¯ Work on exactly which languages are Niger-Congo and what their
relationships are continues. Initial appearances can be deceiving, and
new techniques of analysis often reveal areas that need revision.
32
¯¯ For example, just as the click languages are really three separate
families, the Kordofanian languages of Sudan are at least four families.
They were once treated as one because they are spoken in the same
location by similar groups of people and share some words in common.
However, languages can exchange words, meaning that what may look
like common inheritance actually is not.
¯¯ There are other cases in which it seems unlikely that some subfamilies
of Niger-Congo actually belong to the family at all. The Ijaw
languages in Nigeria have no trace of the noun class prefixes at all,
and their verbs come at the end of the sentence instead of in the
middle, which is odd for the Niger-Congo group. Some today think
this suggests that the Ijaw languages were present before Niger-
Congo even came to the area and represent what pre-Niger-Congo
inhabitants spoke.
SUGGESTED READING
Dimmendaal, Historical Linguistics and the Comparative

Study of African Languages.
Heine and Nurse, eds., African Languages.
33
LECTURE 8
Languages of the Fertile

Crescent and Beyond I
About 70,000 years ago, humans moved

out of Africa to the Middle East. The
next African language family probably
descended from what those humans would
have spoken—that is, the Afro-Asiatic
family. Today, Afro-Asiatic, which includes
about 300 languages, sits on top of Africa,
covering the Sahara and extending into the
Middle East. It includes six subfamilies. This
lecture’s focus is on the Semitic subfamily,
which includes Arabic and Hebrew.
34
Lecture 8 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond I
Arabic
¯¯ Arabic is known for the beauty of its writing. However, the spoken
aspect of the language is equally magnificent, in that Arabic is so
multifarious. Modern Standard Arabic is an artificially preserved
version of language, held fast as it was more or less when the Qur’an
was written, although with new vocabulary.
¯¯ In Arab-speaking locations, people exist in a world that deals with two

languages: Modern Standard Arabic and the local variety, which is
different in two ways.
ww One way they differ is in words. For example, the Modern Standard
Arabic word for nose is anf. The Egyptian Arabic word is manaxir.
ww Then, the local Arabic varieties have a different grammar from the
standard. In Standard Arabic, yamšiyan translates to ‘they walk.’ In
Egyptian, the equivalent term is biyimšu.
35
¯¯ In all, Arabic actually covers a dozen different languages. Arabic, as

dominant as it is today, began as the obscure language of Bedouins. Its
influence spread through Islam across the Middle East and into Africa.
¯¯ The language of the ancient Egyptians was not Arabic but a different
Afro-Asiatic language (fittingly called Egyptian). Additionally, the
languages spoken by peoples elsewhere in North Africa were Berber
ones, also another branch of the Afro-Asiatic family.
The Essence of Afro-Asiatic Languages

¯¯ The defining characteristic of an Afro-Asiatic language is the use of
words that consist of two, three, or four consonants. The vowels change
according to tense, number, and other additions.
¯¯ In Semitic languages, there are three consonants in a typical word,

with vowels modifying the words. For instance, in Hebrew, kotev means
‘he writes’ and katav means ‘he wrote.’ That triconsonantal root is
known elsewhere in the world only in two Native American languages
of California, and one of them inherited it from the other through
contact.
The First Alphabet

¯¯ The first alphabet was written in Afro-Asiatic. Manual laborers in
Egypt figured out that one could use the first letter of a word indicated
with a hieroglyphic to indicate a sound. For instance, a snake symbol,
pronounced “nun” in Egyptian, could be used to signify the sound /n/.
¯¯ The Phoenicians, who were maritime-focused traders, fashioned

this into a writing system—the first to track with sounds rather
than pictures. However, they spoke a Semitic language with the
triconsonantal roots, in which the vowels seemed less important than
the consonants. Thus spawned today’s Arabic and Hebrew systems,
where the vowels are indicated only approximately.
36
Beyond Arabic and Hebrew

¯¯ Arabic and Hebrew are but two of many Semitic languages. By
chance, the others tend to begin with the letter a:
ww Akkadian is dead, but it was the language of the people known as
Assyrian and Babylonian.
ww Aramaic was once used as a lingua franca by the king of Persia and
throughout what it is now the Middle East. It is the language of
portions of the Hebrew Bible, used for that source with the assumption
that people of the time would be familiar with it. Aramaic is today
used by scattered communities in the Middle East in varieties that have
evolved into multiple distinct languages.
ww Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia. Its ancient language,
like Modern Standard Arabic and Biblical Hebrew (or Latin), is Ge’ez,
which evolved into not only Amharic but many obscure Semitic
languages now spoken in Ethiopia.
ww Additionally, there are several languages spoken in the south of Arabia
called South Arabian. They are all endangered.
SUGGESTED READING
Hetzron, The Semitic Languages.

Versteegh, The Arabic Language.
37
LECTURE 9
Languages of the Fertile

Crescent and Beyond II
Modern research suggests that the Semitic

languages emerged in the Middle East.
However, other Afro-Asiatic languages
began and stayed in Africa. Those
languages—particularly the Berber
subfamily and three others—are the focus
of this lecture.
38
Lecture 9 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond II
The Berber Subfamily

¯¯ The Berber languages were spoken across North Africa before
the spread of Arabic. The term Berber comes from the Greek word
for barbarian. It is not preferred by most speakers, who refer to the
language according to the name of
the local variety, such as Tamazight SHILHA ENGLISH
and Shilha.
ks feed on
¯¯ In these languages, words can have fk give
no vowel at all, as in the words from sχf fade away
the Shilha variety shown in the table fqqs irritate
at right.
¯¯ The next three subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic are less known to outsiders,

in part because they tend to be unwritten. However, each subfamily
contains vast numbers of interesting languages, and each subfamily
can also teach a valuable lesson about the nature of language.
The Hausa Language

¯¯ The most well-known language of the next three subfamilies is Hausa,
which is one of the three indigenous lingua francas of Nigeria. (The
other two are Yoruba and Igbo, Niger-Congo languages.)
¯¯ Hausa teaches us how important a language can be despite

unfamiliarity in the West. Hausa is also spoken in Niger, Benin,
Ghana, Togo, Chad, and Cameroon, and is used by about 40 million
people. It has been written since the 1600s, at first in Arabic script
because Hausa’s original speakers were converted to Islam.
¯¯ Hausa was the language of the Sokoto caliphate of the 19th century.
Before that, in the medieval period, it was the language of the Hausa
kingdoms. It has been the language of traders travelling as far as the
Mediterranean.
39
Lecture 9 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond II
The Omotic and Cushitic Languages

¯¯ The Omotic languages are all deeply obscure beyond their area.
However, they show how difficult it can be to chart relationships
between languages beyond a certain time depth. Some researchers
question whether Omotic is an Afro-Asiatic group at all.
¯¯ Researchers have compared the modern Omotic languages,

reconstructed what the words would be in the original Omotic
language, and compared them to words in various Afro-Asiatic
languages of other subfamilies. They have presented this as evidence
that Omotic is akin to them. However, one counterargument goes that
on this basis, one could trace Omotic back to Proto-Indo-European.
¯¯ The Cushitic languages, too, are quite obscure, except for the Somali
language spoken in Somalia. It has only been written since the 1970s,
but it teaches that a language can be quite sophisticated even when not
written. For example, Somali oral poetry has strict, elaborate rules.
SUGGESTED READING
Johnson, “Somali Prosodic Systems.”
40
LECTURE 10
Nilo-Saharan: Africa’s
Hardest Languages?
Africa can be roughly thought of as

divided between Afro-Asiatic languages
on the top and Niger-Congo languages
on the bottom. A third band of languages
runs across the middle (except for a spread
northward in Chad) that belongs to neither
family. These languages are classified as
a separate family called Nilo-Saharan,
comprising about 100 languages.
41
Lecture 10 Nilo-Saharan: Africa’s Hardest Languages?
Overview of the Nilo-Saharan Languages

¯¯ The Nilo-Saharan languages are even more different from one another
than the Niger-Congo languages are. When Joseph Greenberg first
classified African languages, he proposed 16 families, of which 12 are
today considered Nilo-Saharan. This indicates how different from one
another the different subgroups within Nilo-Saharan are.
¯¯ The most widely known Nilo-Saharan languages are Fur, because it is

the language of the people known as Darfur, and Maasai, because of
the fame of the African Maasai people. Meanwhile, only a few Nilo-
Saharan languages are used significantly in writing: Luo, Kalenjin,
Dinka and Nuer.
42
Unique Features of Nilo-Saharan Languages

¯¯ Nilo-Saharan languages can be strikingly unlike European languages.
For example, English features only about a dozen irregular plurals, like
children, geese, and oxen. In Fur, as in many Nilo-Saharan languages,
plurals are all irregular like this.
¯¯ In the Dinka language of Sudan, just changing the pronunciation of a

vowel changes the entire meaning of the word. For example, cól means
‘mouse’ while cǒol means ‘charcoal.’
¯¯ Many Nilo-Saharan languages lack the sound /p/. This is not unknown
in languages—Standard Arabic has no /p/ sound, either—but the
concentration of languages like this in the Saharan region is unusual.
It may be because traditionally, people practiced lip-distorting
procedures in this region, which could have discouraged the /p/ sound.
Languages and Archaeology

¯¯ The words that Nilo-Saharan subfamilies have in common can be
correlated with archaeological evidence to show the emergence of the
family along with African humans’ technological development. One
word is found in all the Nilo-Saharan subfamilies except two, which
likely branched off very early from Proto-Nilo-Saharan. This means
that the word is very old in the family.
¯¯ Originally, the word roughly meant ‘to lead,’ and it is used in many
languages to refer to handling animals. Another word that is found this
widely in the family means ‘cow.’ This would place the origin of most
of Nilo-Saharan near the emergence of the raising of livestock in the
area, which archaeology dates to 9000 BCE.
¯¯ Words like the one for ‘cultivated field’ have roots in fewer subfamilies,
which are thought to be later branches. This word came along later in
the family’s history, as does archaeological evidence for cultivation, in
7000 BCE.
43
¯¯ Then, the words in the subfamilies meaning ‘sheep’ and ‘goat’ came
from Afro-Asiatic languages. This correlates with archaeological
evidence that Nilo-Saharan speakers indeed inherited those animals
from the north in 6000 BCE.
SUGGESTED READING
Ehret, A Historical-Comparative
Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan.
44
LECTURE 11
Is the Indo-European
Family Alone in Europe?
Not every language spoken in Europe falls

under the Indo-European family or Basque.
This lecture looks at the intricacies of
several such languages, including members
of the Uralic family.
45
Lecture 11 Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe?
Estonian
¯¯ Estonian features three key traits. First, a sound in Estonian can be
doubled and even tripled, and this can make the difference between
words’ meanings. For example, sada means ‘hundred,’ saada means
‘send,’ and saaada means ‘to get.’
¯¯ Second, in Estonian, irregularity is almost the rule. It can be a highly

difficult language for non-native speakers to pick up.
¯¯ Third, Estonian is not a Slavic language, but one of the few languages
in Europe that aren’t Indo-European. Namely, this language, and
more famously Finnish and Hungarian, are part of a different family
called Uralic. The Uralic family has a rather eccentric distribution,
covering the cap of Europe and then stretching in fits and starts
eastward into Asia.
¯¯ The Uralic family has its roots in the Ural Mountains. From almost all
of the Uralic languages, it is possible to trace words for certain trees,
among them pine trees, the Siberian fir, and the elm.
46
The Sami Languages

¯¯ An important subset of the Uralic family is the Sami languages, once
known as Lappish. The Sami people were originally referred to as
Finns until the name was switched to today’s Finns, who had a more
settled lifestyle while the Sami were nomadic.
¯¯ Sami is first recorded in about 1200 on a shovel found in a bog in

Iceland. It features writing in Sami and Old Norse.
¯¯ The modern distribution shows that the family was once much more
widespread—another indication that Indo-European was an intruder.
Additionally, Finnish and Estonian are closely related to two languages
spoken much further east called Mari and Mordvin, meaning there
were once likely similar languages spoken between them.
Hungarian
¯¯ Another Uralic language spoken in Europe is Hungarian, located in
areas far from Estonian and Finnish speakers. Hungarian speakers
came from Siberia, arriving at their current region in 895.
¯¯ There is a reference in
ancient Greek literature
to an Onogouroi people
who had been driven from
their native Siberia. This
seems to be a version of the
name Hungary, as opposed
to what Hungarians call
themselves, Magyar. The
Uralic languages most like
Hungarian are a few spoken
in Siberia.
47
Uralic Characteristics
¯¯ The Uralic languages are rather tidy in allocating each unit of
meaning to one suffix. For example, in Spanish, a single suffix in
the past can mean both ‘I’ and ‘past.’ In Finnish, by contrast, one
suffix means ‘I’ while another one means ‘past.’ This is termed an
agglutinative language, as opposed to a fusional language, which seems
typical from an Indo-European perspective.
¯¯ Turkish is also agglutinative, which was part of why for a long time
some linguists thought the Uralic languages were part of a larger
grouping including Turkish and its relatives, called Ural-Altaic.
Hungarians preferred this idea out of admiration for Turkish history.
However, this idea is now defunct.
¯¯ Uralic languages do not assign arbitrary genders to nouns, which

is quite unusual in Europe beyond English (and Basque). Uralic
languages have elaborate lists of suffixes. In Finnish, for example, talo,
meaning ‘house,’ takes various suffixes depending on whether one
going into the house, leaving it, and so on.
The Health of the Uralic Languages

¯¯ In 1949, author Mario Pei wrote that the futures of Hungarian,
Turkish, and Finnish were dim. This seems an odd notion today.
¯¯ Many smaller Uralic languages are

indeed endangered; for example,
SUGGESTED READING the last speaker of Livonian died
in the early 2010s. Regardless, the
Abondolo, ed., extinction Pei predicted of even
The Uralic Languages. larger languages has not come to
Karlsson, Finnish. pass. Uralic is an obscure family,
but not a moribund one.
48
LECTURE 12
How to Identify
a Language Family
Languages always change, and when

offshoots of a language separate and
change in different directions, the result
is a family of descendants of what was
once one language. This lecture looks at
the methods and difficulties of identifying
separate language families.
49
Lecture 12 How to Identify a Language Family
Identifying a Family: Polynesian

¯¯ The fundamental trait of a language family is that it is possible to posit
a protolanguage from which the modern languages developed via
regular sound changes. These changes need to be seen operating not
just in one word, but in a great many.
¯¯ The languages of Polynesia are a useful demonstration, in that these

languages are some of the world’s newest, many emerging only in the
last millennium with the settlement of certain islands in the South
Pacific.
¯¯ As such, the languages differ to a modest degree, making it relatively

easy to not only see that they are related, but to reconstruct what
the father language would have been. The following shows different
English words, their equivalents in Polynesian languages, and their
ancestral protoform:
ENGLISH post forbidden cry stay
MAORI pou tapu taŋi hono
HAWAIIAN pou kapu kani hono
SAMOAN pou tapu taŋi fono
FIJIAN bou tabu taŋi vono
PROTOFORM pou tapu taŋi fono
¯¯ With the words corresponding to the English post, one can assume that
if most of them have the letter p, then most likely the original language
did as well. Thus, the Proto-Polynesian word for post was pou. Similar
majority-rules principles can be used to reconstruct other words.
50
Identifying a Family: Indo-European

¯¯ Identifying relationships between languages usually isn’t as
straightforward as with the Polynesian group, however. For example,
one could listen to or read Hindi for weeks and never figure out that it
had the slightest relationship to English.
¯¯ Less obvious relationships between languages reveal themselves in

a small collection of words that are most often used. This is because
words used often are subject to the stasis of habit and therefore change
more slowly than others. For example, the linguist Morris Swadesh
composed a list of 100 concepts assumed to be shared by languages of
any culture and used heavily. Among those concepts are the words for
I, you, we, bird, and dog.
¯¯ Related languages will not match up perfectly on Swadesh’s list, as

chance means that languages will exchange words for others over
time. For instance, English is alone in Indo-European in its use of
dog rather than a word related to hound. However, if languages share
cognates for a representative portion of these words, and the sound
laws used for Polynesian can be applied to them, then the languages
have a family relationship.
¯¯ This allows linguists to know from words like father that there is an
Indo-European family. To pick three examples, father is pater in Latin,
vater in German, and athir in Irish.
¯¯ Once relatively obvious cases like this are clear, linguists have a basis
for charting less intuitive processes of change, such that they can
reconstruct how the various languages in a family came to be the way
they are without any explicit documentation of the processes happening.
¯¯ For example, the Armenian word for bride,

SANSKRIT snuṣā
nu, began as a Proto-Indo-European word,
OLD ENGLISH snoru
snusos. The variations of the word daughter-
in-law, shown at right, is helpful for tracing RUSSIAN snokhá
the word snusos. LATIN nurus
GREEK nuós
51
¯¯ Some of the words begin with sn- while others begin with n. It is more
likely that several separate languages lost an s by ordinary sound
erosion than that several separate languages somehow sprouted an s.
Therefore, the word began with sn-.
¯¯ To decide whether the first vowel was an o or a u, we choose u, because

more of the words have u than o. Thus, the first word would have begun
with snu-.
¯¯ The second consonant is a bit harder to decide on. Here, some

additional information provides a nudge the right direction. In many
Latin words, the letter r between vowels had begun as s. In Russian,
many /kh/ sounds trace back to s in earlier Slavic languages. This gives
us another /s/ sound in the examples, so the assumption can be made
that the first word began with snus-.
¯¯ Because daughter-in-law is a feminine concept, languages like Spanish

and Italian would point in a certain direction: The suffix -o is the
masculine ending and -a the feminine one, so scholars would expect
the original ending to have been -a. However, Latin and Greek have
-ós and -us as masculine endings. In Armenian, when the word is given
case endings, an o appears on the stem: nuo.
¯¯ It is more likely that the ending was for some reason originally
masculine and some languages corrected it than that some languages
changed a feminine form to a masculine one. Thus, the Proto-
Indo-European word must have been snusos. Through comparative
reconstruction, then, it is revealed that a word that is merely nu
in Albanian today began as the longer, chunkier snusos. Indo-
Europeanists mark these hypothetical forms with an asterisk: *snusos.
Even without written records of earlier stages, linguists can

reconstruct that seemingly disparate languages originated from a
common ancestor—that is, they belong to a language family.
52
Identifying a Family: Uralic

¯¯ Usually, identifying a family and the relationships within it requires
proceeding with neither of the aids present in the Proto-Indo-European
and Polynesian cases. For example, Finnish and Hungarian are
members of the same family; however, this is little more evident from
the languages as they are spoken today than the relationship between
English and Hindi is, and records of older stages of these languages do
not go back as far as Indo-European ones and are not as copious.
¯¯ However, core words of the

Swadesh list type reveal the ENGLISH FINNISH HUNGARIAN
relationship. There are cognates blood veri vér
A
of this kind, and these similarities hand käsi kéz
could not be accidental. (See water vesi víz
section A of table.)
what mitä mit
¯¯ Additionally, there are regular B two kaksi kettő
sound change processes that three kolme három
shape the differences between six kuusi hat
Finnish and Hungarian
C fish kala hal
cognates, showing that there
was once a single language head pää fő (‘main’)
that later became the two (and nest pesä fészek
others). (See section B of table.)
¯¯ The Finnish ks is ironed out into a single

consonant in Hungarian, and the k in
Finnish is often an h in Hungarian. SUGGESTED READING
This means that the seeming unlikeness
Arlotto, Introduction to
between words like Finnish’s kala and
Historical Linguistics.
Hungarian’s hal for fish is actually
illusory. Another rule is that p becomes Crowley and Bowern,
f, just as in the Proto-Indo-European An Introduction to
pater becoming the English father. (See Historical Linguistics.
section C of table.)
53
QUIZ
LECTURES 7–12
1 Do Niger-Congo languages that keep words short trend toward

heavier or lighter usage of tones? [7]
2 Which Niger-Congo language is notable for its use of up to 20

genders? [7]
3 Arabic began as the relatively obscure language of which group of

people? [8]
4 What is the defining characteristic of an Afro-Asiatic language? [8]
5 How many people use the Hausa language today? [9]
6 Which Afro-Asiatic subfamily features words that can have no vowels

at all? [9]
54
7 How many languages comprise the Nilo-Saharan family? [10]
8 What sound do many Nilo-Saharan families lack? [10]
9 On what item was the earliest recording of the Sami language, and
where was it found? [11]
10 In general, how do the Uralic languages approach suffixes? [11]
11 What is the fundamental trait of a language family? [12]
12 Which linguist came up with the list of 100 concepts that are assumed
to be shared by languages of any culture and used heavily? [12]
55
LECTURE 13
What Is a
Caucasian Language?
The small and highly mountainous region

of the Caucasus Mountains features
dozens of very different languages (and
likely featured more in antiquity). The
languages here are called the Caucasian
languages. The languages of the Caucasus
are three separate families, with no
demonstrable proto-language traceable as
ancestral to the three.
56
Lecture 13 What Is a Caucasian Language?
The Three Families

¯¯ The names of the families are less important than their existence, but
there is a southern family, a northwestern family, and a northeastern
family. The southern family is the smallest and includes Georgian,
which is the only Caucasus language with any renown beyond the area.
¯¯ Northwest Caucasian includes Kabardian and the Abkhaz language.

Northeast Caucasian includes most of the languages of the area,
including Lezgian, Tsez, Archi, and Avar.
The Area’s Diversity

¯¯ Topography is why there are so many languages in such a small area.
Mountains and valleys allow speakers to be separate from one another
for long periods, such that languages have diverged considerably.
¯¯ As linguist Johanna Nichols has documented, the languages spoken

in higher elevations tend to be the most complicated. That is because
of invaders: When people overrun others, the relocated people often
learn the invaders’ language. Roughly speaking, people who fled into
the mountains were more able to keep their own language, rather than
learning a simplified form of another language as adults.
57
Lecture 13 What Is a Caucasian Language?
¯¯ Within the Northeast Caucasian family, Tsezic languages branched off

earliest and are spoken highest up; another subfamily is spoken lower
in the mountains, and then another one is spoken even lower down.
Complexity and Features

¯¯ The Caucasus languages are complex grammatically to an extent that
can surprise speakers of languages like English. As languages rarely
learned by outsiders, they have been able to amass massive elaboration.
¯¯ Roughly speaking, Northwest Caucasian languages have very complex

case marking on nouns. Northeast Caucasian languages have very
complex verb markings. South Caucasian languages are complex in
both their nouns and their verbs. In Archi, for example, a verb can occur
in 1,502,839 different forms. Additionally, Caucasian languages have the
fewest vowels of any human languages, Abkhaz being one example.
¯¯ Other vowels come out based on what sound those vowels are next to.
For example, Abkhaz speakers do use the sound /oh/, but it only comes
out after sounds that involve putting your lips together, like /p/ and /b/.
That means speakers create the sound /boh/ but not /bah/. In English,
this is similar to how the word leaves is, at its base, the word leafs.
¯¯ Caucasus languages also tend to have ejective consonants, where

speakers release air more explosively than usual, creating the impression
of spitting out the sound. It is possibly not an accident that these sounds
thrive in languages spoken in such a mountainous region. Caleb Everett
has shown that worldwide, ejectives are more likely in languages spoken
at high altitudes because compressing air is easier when air is thinner.
SUGGESTED READING
Colarusso, A Grammar of the Kabardian Language.

McWhorter, What Language Is.
58
LECTURE 14
Indian Languages That

Aren’t Indo-European
This lecture focuses on non-Indo-European

languages in India, namely the Dravidian
languages. The Dravidian language family
includes about 24 members, notably four
prominent languages of southern India:
Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam.
These languages are no more related to
the Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi than
Finnish is to English.
59
Lecture 14 Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European
History of the Dravidian Languages

¯¯ The pattern of distribution of Dravidian languages suggests that the
languages were once spoken much farther northward as well. Members
like Kurukh are spoken in northeast India, while Brahui is spoken in
Pakistan.
¯¯ However, there is some evidence that the northern languages’ speakers

may have moved there. Brahui and Kurukh folklore portray the groups
as immigrants. Additionally, Brahui has many loaned words from
Balochi, which arrived in the region around 1000 CE, but not from the
ancient Iranian language Avestan, as other languages of the area that
have been there much longer do.
¯¯ Tamil has one of longest written documentations of the world’s

languages. It is first attested in cave inscriptions mixing Prakrit and
Tamil in the 3rd century BCE, and is attested in full in 1st century AD
Buddhist writings.
¯¯ There are so many Sanskrit-loaned words in Malayalam, Kannada,

and Telugu that Western analysts long thought that they were Indo-
Aryan languages. This is a lesson that the essence of a language is its
grammatical structure, not its word stockpile.
60
Dravidian Structure
¯¯ Indo-Aryan languages were deeply influenced by speakers of
Dravidian. As such, Dravidian languages roughly embody what
distinguishes Indo-Aryan languages from other Indo-European ones.
¯¯ Retroflex consonants are pronounced with

the tongue curled backward. In Tamil, a TAMIL ENGLISH
retroflex n makes the difference between mana mind
the words for mind and fragrance. In the
same way, in Hindi, a retroflex d makes the ma a fragrance
difference between lentil and branch.
¯¯ Gender marking is based on different plans HINDI ENGLISH

in Dravidian languages than in Indo-
dal lentil
European languages. Tamil divides nouns
into rational groups (people and deities) and al branch
irrational groups (animals, children, and all
else). Sadly, some dialects exclude women
from the rational.
¯¯ In Kurukh, verbs take different endings depending on whether a man

or woman is talking. They also take different endings depending on
whether a man or woman is being spoken to.
¯¯ In Tamil, the standard/written variety maintains the stage the

language was at in antiquity. Colloquial varieties represent how
the language has evolved naturally. They are essentially different
languages from the standard. This is a common situation in languages
called diglossia. For example, to say male student, written Tamil uses
maan ̣avan while colloquial Tamil uses maan ̣avε.̃
61
The Languages of the Andaman Islands

¯¯ The Andaman Islands are part of an archipelago eastward of India.
Even though their combined area is only about 2,500 square miles,
there were originally 14 languages spoken on them by about 5,000
people, comprising at least two and possibly more families.
¯¯ The indigenous people are descendants of the first humans to

make their way across southern Asia on their way to Indonesia and
Australia. The proliferation of languages demonstrates how much
language change can take place in 50,000 years. One of the languages,
Sentinelese, is unknown because its speakers have all but entirely
resisted contact with the outside world.
62
¯¯ The language situation here was inevitably fragile in the face of

contact with the modern world. Today, there are no speakers left of
the larger family—the last one died in 2010—and only a few hundred
speakers of the two or three living languages in the other family
remain. The British established a penal colony in the 1860s, and since
then most inhabitants have come to speak Hindi.
¯¯ The Kusunda language of Nepal has been thought to have no living

relatives. However, some of its words are very similar in shape to the
equivalent words in some Andamanese languages, such as Juwoi. Since
there would be no reason for contact between people in Nepal and
Andaman Islands residents, this is likely evidence that Kusunda is a
branch of the same language that seeded the Andaman Island families
tens of thousands of years ago.
SUGGESTED READING
Emeneau, “India as a Linguistic Area.”

Krishnamurti, The Dravidian Languages.
63
LECTURE 15
Languages of the
Silk Road and Beyond
The languages called Altaic are spoken

across Asia, from Turkey through Mongolia
to northeastern regions of Asia. These
languages’ geographical as well as
cultural relationship make them a natural
fit for this lecture, which focuses on Turkish
and its relatives, Altaic’s most famous
members.
64
Lecture 15 Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond
Turkic Languages
¯¯ Turkish is one of a group of languages quite similar to one another
called, collectively, Turkic. This group began around Mongolia and
spread eastward, then westward. Turkic was spoken by the Huns and
by most members of Genghis Khan’s army, and it was the Khans’ court
language. The Mughals who ruled India from the 16th through the
19th century also spoke a Turkic variety.
¯¯ Anatolia—today’s Turkey—was first occupied by early Indo-European

speakers and then by Greeks, Anatolians (likely Hittite speakers), and
Kurdish speakers. Turkic-speaking Seljuks and then the Ottomans
took over, and Turkish was established there by the 1200s. Many of the
Turkic languages are, to a considerable extent, less separate languages
than a continuum of dialects shading into one another over a long
distance.
¯¯ In these languages, a suffix’s vowel changes according to the vowel

in the word it is attached to. Turkic words can also have suffix
sandwiches, in which what would be a whole sentence in English can
be rendered by a single word.
¯¯ The Turkic languages have been spoken amidst much linguistic and
cultural contact with Persian and Arabic, and as a result, they have
often taken on a great deal of vocabulary from Persian and Arabic.
The written variety of Turkish under the Ottomans, for example, was
barely recognizable as Turkic because it was so mixed a language.
¯¯ Kemal Atatürk, leader of Turkey starting in 1923, wanted to steer

Turkey from Arabic to Western influence. He changed the script from
Arabic to Roman and also instituted a purge of Arabic and Persian
words, substituting Turkish words.
65
Mongolic Languages
¯¯ The native languages of the Mongols who ruled much of the Western
world in antiquity have not spread much because they ruled in Turkic.
However, this group includes varieties of Mongolian and a few other
languages, including one spoken as far east as Russia called Kalmyk.
¯¯ Mongolian has a trait that lends a sense of how languages can focus on
different facets of being human. For instance, both of these sentences
say that it rained yesterday:
Eucegder borao or-lao.
Eucegder borao or-jai.
¯¯ The first one, with -lao, means that the speaker knows that it rained
because the speaker saw it. The second one, with -jao, is what a speaker
would say if the speaker had been inside, walked outside, and saw
evidence that it had rained, such as half-dried puddles.
66
¯¯ This is analogous to the difference in English between “It rained

yesterday” and “It must have rained yesterday.” However, Mongolian
forces the speaker to express that difference more consistently, and
the equivalence isn’t exact. This nuance is a type of mood, like the
imperative and the subjunctive, called evidentiality.
Tungusic Languages
¯¯ The Tungusic languages are a small, scattered group spoken in eastern
China and parts of Russia, including Siberia. The one with a written
history is Manchu, spoken by the people who ruled China for almost
300 years until 1912. They teach a lesson: Rulers have often not ruled
in their native language. As the Persians ruled in Aramaic and the
Mongols ruled in Turkic, the Manchu ruled in Chinese (Mandarin)
and kept their language to themselves.
¯¯ However, they sent a large number of speakers to the Xinjiang

province in the west to a garrison, and 30,000 of their descendants still
speak a variety of Manchu there today. They outnumber people who
speak all of the other Tungusic languages combined, vastly removed
from where the languages emerged.
SUGGESTED READING
Johanson and Csató, The Turkic Languages.

Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform.
67
LECTURE 16
Japanese and Korean:

Alike yet Unrelated
This lecture discusses the Japanese and

Korean languages. Some linguists have
proposed that Japanese and Korean are
Altaic languages, but that proposal has
had little success. Both languages have
certain Altaic features, but this could be
due to borrowing rather than inheritance.
Japanese and Korean words do not trace
back to ones in Altaic in any real way.
However, there is likely some relationship
between them.
68
Lecture 16 Japanese and Korean: Alike yet Unrelated
Japanese Writing
¯¯ The Japanese writing system is both unusual and interesting. The word
order is quite unlike what Indo-European speakers are used to. For
example, the Japanese equivalent of saying “That girl bought a book at
Disneyland” would translate to “That girl Disneyland at book bought.”
¯¯ Writing Japanese requires knowing three different systems of writing,

all used together. For example, in “That girl bought a book at
Disneyland,” the words for girl, book, and buy would all be written
in Chinese. The foreign word for Disneyland would be written with
symbols corresponding to syllables. Finally, the words for grammar
would be written in yet another system, also based on syllables.
¯¯ The Chinese system is called kanji, the system for grammar words is
called hiragana, and the system for foreign words is called katakana.
その少女はディズニーランドで本を買った
Sono shōjo wa Disneyland de hon o kat -ta
That girl Disneyland at book bought
“That girl bought a book at Disneyland.”
Refer to the video or audio lesson for more details on the Japanese
writing system.
69
Other Features of Japanese

¯¯ When using Western languages, speakers attend to person and number
especially closely. In Japanese, one attends in the same way to issues of
status. This is called the honorific aspect of the language. For example,
how you would say something as simple as “I’d see him” varies
according to your gender. Japanese requires more attention to gender
than Western languages.
¯¯ Sentences also change according to the status of the person you are
talking to and the status of who you are referring to. An analogy is
that you might say, “The king was dining,” rather than saying, “The
king was having some grub.” This kind of difference is entrenched in
everyday expression in Japanese.
¯¯ Japanese also has three kinds of words: native words, ones derived
from Chinese, and ones derived from other languages such as English.
Often, there are three different words for the same concept but from
these three sources, with the native one the humblest, the Chinese one
more formal, and the Western one more cosmopolitan. For example,
there are various ways to render hotel in Japanese:
METHOD WORD MEANING

Japanese-derived yadoya ‘inn’
Sino-Japanese-derived ryokan ‘Japanese-style hotel’
English-derived hoteru ‘Western-style hotel’
70
¯¯ This difference makes the writing system even more complicated, in

that kanji can refer either to the native Japanese word or the Chinese-
derived one. Often, there are two Chinese-derived words borrowed at
different periods in the history of Chinese. Thus, here are three ways
to read the kanji for rice:
METHOD SYMBOL WORD MEANING

Native method 米 kome ‘rice’
Chinese method 1 外米 gai mai ‘imported rice’
Chinese method 2 米国 bei koku ‘rice-land’ (or ‘America’)
Korean Language Features

¯¯ To learn Japanese after Korean or vice versa is to feel as if one is
learning the same language with different words. They are similar not
only in Altaic-style features such as having the verb at the end of the
sentence, but in specifics of sentence structure such as the markers of
topic and object and even the shape of the past marker.
¯¯ Korean also has honorifics in the same way as Japanese, along with
other features. The reason for this is not yet known. However, a
promising idea from archaeology, history, and early attestations is that
Japanese began as a mainland Asian language, perhaps Austronesian.
Speakers of another language from northwards began speaking their
language in “Japanese,” with their own words (Korean) and the new
grammar ( Japanese).
¯¯ Korean requires attention to different shadings of consonants than

English-only speakers are accustomed to. There is a difference between
a /p/ sound pronounced with an aspirated versus a non-aspirated
method—that is, how much the speaker “pushes” the sound out. Refer
to the video or audio lesson to hear this in action.
71
Korean Writing
¯¯ Korean’s writing system is called Hangul. Half of the Korean
language’s words are derived from Chinese, and the language was
once written with Chinese. However, its modern writing system is quite
unlike Chinese’s or Japanese’s. It was invented in 1443 by King Sejong.
¯¯ It corresponds beautifully to the sounds of the actual language. For

example, there are different letters for aspirated versus non-aspirated
sounds. Thus, the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
are quite distinguishable.
SUGGESTED READING
Miller, The Japanese Language.

Shibatani, “Japanese.”
72
LECTURE 17
The Languages
We Call Chinese
The course now turns to the languages of

East and Southeast Asia beyond Japanese
and Korean. Several families occupy this
space. This lecture focuses on a group
that we conventionally think of as just one
language: Chinese. However, that label
actually corresponds to much more than
one might suppose.
73
Lecture 17 The Languages We Call Chinese
Overview of the Chinese Languages

¯¯ In one East Asian language, the way to say introduce is jièshào. In another
in the same area, the way to say it is gaaisiuh. These languages are as
different as Spanish and Italian. They use the same writing system,
however, and therefore you write both of the words the same way.
¯¯ These languages are Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. They are

typically termed dialects of Chinese, but this is graphocentric. Because
Chinese writing is based on words rather than sounds, Mandarin and
Cantonese can be written with the same system.
¯¯ The so-called Chinese dialects are different languages, just as the

Romance languages are. They are the descendants of the Old Chinese
language that existed 3,000 years ago, just as the Romance languages
descended from Latin. The terms language and dialect are often used
arbitrarily, in reference to culture and writing as well as speech. China
is a classic case.
¯¯ Mandarin is spoken by about 1 billion people in China, Taiwan and

Singapore—that is, about every seventh person in the world. Seventy
percent of Chinese speakers speak it. Cantonese is the next most
prominent language, especially in America. That is because most
Chinese immigrants to the US before 1965 spoke Cantonese.
¯¯ Taiwanese is one variety of Min, spoken by more people than

Cantonese. Shanghainese is an entire separate language, as different
from Mandarin as Dutch is from German. Hakka, Gan and Xiang are
less known outside China, but are all distinct as well.
¯¯ These languages all exist in various dialects, many mutually

unintelligible. Min, for example, is actually various languages. One
could say that there are actually dozens of Chinese languages rather
than seven. The writing system, however, encourages a sense that
they are all one unit. Additionally, education and policy inculcate
Mandarin, such that it permeates the other dialects to an extent, giving
the illusion that there is a single “real Chinese.”
74
Tones
MANDARIN ENGLISH
¯¯ In Chinese languages, the pitch
one utters a syllable on is as central má ‘rough’
to expressing meaning as different mà ‘scold’
consonants and vowels are in English.
For instance, Mandarin has several mā ‘mother’
tones, in which the word ma has mǎ ‘horse’
different meanings according to tone.
ma ‘huh?’
Compounds
¯¯ Mandarin words are single syllables consisting of a consonant and
a vowel, and some with a final n. Other dialects may have a wider
selection of consonants at the end, but still, there are only so many
of these single syllables possible. Even distinguished by tones, a
language needs more than this equipment to cover tens of thousands of
basic words.
¯¯ Thus, in Chinese languages, combinations of two or more words—

compounds like blackboard and bluebird—are the default rather than
possibilities as they are in languages like English. For example, movie
is diàn yǐng, meaning ‘electric shadow,’ and the word for Mandarin
Chinese is pǔ tōng huà, meaning ‘general connection talk.’
¯¯ Many of these compounds do not make sense as combinations of their

words and are simply chunks, like understand in English. One is the
jièshào word mentioned earlier, which combines the words meaning
‘put between’ and ‘continue.’ The word corresponding to thing, dōngxi,
combines the words meaning ‘east’ and ‘west.’
You can’t learn to read Chinese simply by memorizing what all of

the symbols mean. Learners also have to know what they mean
when combined.
75
Numeral Classifiers
¯¯ In Chinese languages, whenever something is used with a number,
you have to use a little word that corresponds to various qualities of
the thing. For example, sān means ‘three.’ The table below lists just a
few of the 25 or so words one must use to say that there are three of
something.
¯¯ These numeral classifiers are CHINESE ENGLISH

often irregular. For instance, sān ge háizi ‘three children’
one uses zhī not only with
animals, but also with eyes sān zhī gǒu ‘three dogs’
and suitcases. sān tiáo yú ‘three fish’
sān kē shù ‘three trees’
sān bǎ dāo ‘three knives’
SUGGESTED READING
Norman, Chinese.
Wiedenhof, A Grammar of Chinese.
76
LECTURE 18
Chinese’s Family Circle:

Sino-Tibetan
Chinese is actually one branch of the

Sino-Tibetan family. The other branch
is Tibeto-Burman, including about 400
languages spoken mainly in southern
China, northeastern India, and Burma.
This lecture looks at the Sino-Tibetan
family’s roots and features.
77
Lecture 18 Chinese’s Family Circle: Sino-Tibetan
Proto-Sino-Tibetan
¯¯ The Sino-Tibetan protolanguage
likely emerged in China, with
Chinese developing via a
movement northward. The rest
of the language, making up
the Tibeto-Burman subfamily,
developed amidst a movement
southward.
¯¯ Most Sino-Tibetan languages are similar to Chinese in being based

on single syllables, often with tone. This makes it hard to reconstruct
Proto-Sino-Tibetan because so many of the original prefixes and
suffixes have been worn off.
78
¯¯ Linguists can reconstruct, by comparing many of the modern

languages in the family, that the Proto-Sino-Tibetan word for eight was
approximately baragjat. However, eight in modern Mandarin is just a
shard of that original word, bā. The intermediate stage was, in Middle
Chinese, pwæt. Thus Proto-Sino-Tibetan words were quite unlike their
modern descendants.
Tibetan
¯¯ As the family’s name suggests, the two biggest Tibeto-Burman languages
are Tibetan and Burmese. Tibetan actually refers to roughly 25 different
languages in Tibet and beyond that have developed from an ancestor
now called Classical Tibetan.
¯¯ These languages show another feature that makes it hard to trace back
to Proto-Sino-Tibetan: how tone develops. Tonal distinctions often
develop when a consonant erodes and leaves the tone behind. We tend
to pronounce a vowel on a somewhat lower pitch after b than after a p,
for example. Thus, we might say back on a lower pitch than pack, using a
lower-pitched /baa/ sound and a higher-pitched /paa/ sound, respectively.
¯¯ Over time, a natural change would be if the k wore off the end of the
words. If it does, then the only thing distinguishing the words is the
difference in pitch. As counterintuitive as that can seem to an English
speaker, humans can process this normally just as they can process the
difference between vowels and consonants. This is how tones emerge in
a language.
¯¯ Classical Tibetan was not tonal, but many of the modern Tibetan
languages are. When a consonant wore off the beginning of words, it
often left a tone behind, so that today, words are different only in tone
that used to be different in terms of consonants. For example, in a
Tibetan variety of Nepal, the word for sky is nam with a high tone. The
word in Classical Tibetan is gnam.
79
Burmese
¯¯ As is common in languages of South and Southeast Asia, to use
Burmese is to speak quite differently from how you write. It is also
common to speak in radically different ways depending on social
context. Burmese writing is based on an early stage of the language,
such that the difference between speech and writing is pronounced.
¯¯ Additionally, Burmese is highly diglossic: The vocabulary of formal

contexts and writing differs massively from that of informal speech,
in the sense of English’s kids versus children and bag versus parcel, but
to a much vaster extent. To speak Burmese is essentially to speak two
languages, so-called high and low varieties.
The Nature of Grammar

¯¯ It is easy to suppose that languages on the Chinese plan lack what
is traditionally thought of as grammar. However, the other Tibeto-
Burman languages provide a useful lesson that there are many ways
that a language can be complex. Some of the components of the
sentence “I gave him one fruit” in Akha, of Burma, Thailand, Laos,
Vietnam and China are shown in the table below.
AKHA ENGLISH
ŋá I
àj he
bì ̰ gave
áshì (aspirated) fruit
thì (aspirated) one
80
¯¯ One might assume, given that there are no endings to worry about, that
the way to structure it would be ŋà bḭ̀ àjɔ̰ ̀ thì áshì, meaning, “I gave
[him] one fruit.” However, the structure is actually different, featuring
the verb at the end and the phrase “fruit one,” not “one fruit.”
¯¯ Additionally, Akha has classifiers, an object marker, a marker you use

when the subject does something to an object, and then a marker at the
end of the sentence to mark it as a declaration.
ŋà nɛ àj áŋ áshì thì shì bì ̰ ma

I he fruit one gave
“I gave him one fruit.”
¯¯ In sum, even a language without conjugations and a subjunctive can be

quite complex in other ways. This is true of languages not only in Sino-
Tibetan but in other families of Southeast Asia as well.
SUGGESTED READING
Thurgood and LaPolla, eds., The Sino-Tibetan Languages.
81
QUIZ
LECTURES 13–18
1 Why are there so many languages in an area as small as the

Caucuses? [13]
2 What is one possible reason that ejective consonants thrive in the

Caucuses area? [13]
3 Which four Dravidian languages are prominent languages of

southern India? [14]
4 How are retroflex consonants pronounced? [14]
5 Where did the Turkish languages begin? [15]
6 Which Turkish leader was responsible for a purge of Arabic and

Persian words, substituting Turkish words? [15]
82
7 What three systems are involved in Japanese writing? [16]
8 What is Korean’s writing system called? [16]
9 Roughly how many people speak Mandarin Chinese? [17]
10 What system is used in many Chinese languages to produce multiple

meanings from the same word? [17]
11 Where did the Sino-Tibetan protolanguage likely emerge? [18]
12 Why is it difficult to reconstruct the Sino-Tibetan protolanguage? [18]
83
LECTURE 19
Southeast Asian Languages:

The Sinosphere
There are three language families spoken

in Southeast Asia just below the reach
of Sino-Tibetan. It would be easy to
suppose that Thai and Vietnamese are
related, but they actually belong to two
distinct families. Then, Hmong is part of
yet another family. These families are
called Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, and
Hmong-Mien.
84
Lecture 19 Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere
Overview
¯¯ These languages seem almost oddly alike, and in turn, uncannily like
Chinese. Typical of this region is monosyllabic structure, tones, and
also a telegraphic essence, in which ordinary sentences can leave more
to context than European languages.
¯¯ When languages across families resemble one another structurally

in this way despite their differing origins, it is called a sprachbund.
Sprachbunds happen when a great many people in a region are bilingual
or multilingual over long periods of time, such that the languages come
to resemble one another. This shows that, along with origins, language
contact is decisive in determining what languages are like.
¯¯ There is reason to think that the main reason for the resemblance of
these families is that Chinese has had a major impact on all three of
the families spoken to the south of it. This sprachbund is called the
Sinosphere. Chinese speakers migrated southward and made most of
the languages of Southeast Asia quite different from what they were
originally like.
85
The Hmong-Mien Family

¯¯ The Hmong-Mien family consists of
perhaps three dozen languages. The
most immediately striking feature of
these languages is how many tones they
can have. The White Hmong variety
has seven, and some have up to 12.
¯¯ Through language reconstruction,

linguists know these languages adopted
features from Chinese. Reconstruction shows that Hmong-Mien
languages used to have noun class prefixes like Swahili. There are
more remnants of those in the Hmong-type languages, which have had
less influence from Chinese, than from the Mien-type ones.
¯¯ These languages are stippled throughout their area in a way that

suggests that they were once spoken uniformly across the territory and
were later displaced by an immigrating group. That group would be
the Chinese. Hmong-Mien speakers live up in the hills, which suggests
that the Chinese displaced them in the same way some Caucasian-
language speakers displaced others in the past.
The Austroasiatic Family

¯¯ Vietnamese belongs to a family
called Austroasiatic, about 150
languages spoken in Southeast Asia
and extending westward into India.
¯¯ Vietnamese is a typical Sinosphere

language, with six tones and
monosyllabic words that occur in
many compounds. This is because
northern Vietnam was a part of
China for about 1,000 years before
939 AD.
86
Chinese words permeate Vietnamese vocabulary in the same way

as they do Japanese and Korean.
¯¯ The Chinese influence upon this family is clear in that while

Vietnamese (and nearby languages) are of the Sinospheric profile,
the languages of the family spoken farther away are much less of this
type, such as the Munda languages in India and the Aslian languages
spoken in the southern part of the Southeast Asian peninsula. They
still have prefixes and/or suffixes, for example.
¯¯ Many Austroasiatic languages also have a feature called register, which

functions like tone to encode meaning differences between otherwise
identical syllables. Tones and register differences transform from one
into another, and when both disappear, they often leave behind many
subtly different vowels.
¯¯ Austroasiatic languages have some of the largest numbers of vowels of

any languages (in contrast to click and Caucasian languages with more
consonants). Cambodian, for example, has about 30 different vowels
including its diphthongs, as opposed to English having about 15.
The Tai-Kadai Family

¯¯ Thai is one member of the
Tai-Kadai family. It, too, is a
typical Sinospheric language.
However, the family is likely
an offshoot of one that is quite
unlike Chinese.
87
¯¯ Because most of the 75 or so languages of the family are still spoken

in southern China, it is apprarent that early speakers of this language
family migrated southward from there as the Chinese expanded.
Contact with Chinese (and other languages already affected by
Chinese) made the languages Sinospheric.
¯¯ It is very important in Thai to have a politeness particle at the end of

a sentence, and the particles differ according to the speaker’s gender.
For example. there are two ways to say “thank you” in Thai. The male
version is kɔ̀ɔp kun kráp, and the female version is kɔ̀ɔp kun kâ.
SUGGESTED READING
Enfield, A Grammar of Lao.
88
LECTURE 20
Languages of
the South Seas I
The Austronesian group is one of the

world’s vastest and most widespread
language families. The family consists of
well over 1,000 languages that spread
from Indonesia across the island of New
Guinea, throughout the South Seas,
eastward of Australia, and all the way to
Easter Island.
89
Lecture 20 Languages of the South Seas I
Overview of the Austronesian Family

¯¯ Scholars know that these widely separated languages are a family
because they have words in common that can be used to reconstruct a
protolanguage, as in the five languages shown below. (Tagalog is the
main language of the Philippines, and Motu is a language spoken on
the island of New Guinea.)
MALAY TAGALOG MOTU FIJIAN SAMOAN ENGLISH

mata mata mata mata mata eye
batu bato nadi vatu fatu stone
kutu kuto utu kutu ʔutu louse
ibu inâ sina tina tinaa mother
¯¯ Austronesian is the group that the Tai-Kadai language family likely

branched off from. The language that became Japanese in contact with
Korean may also have been an Austronesian one.
¯¯ It is difficult to give a single characterization to a family this large,

just as there are few traits universal to the Niger-Congo languages.
However, Austronesian languages often exhibit a feature unusual to
most speakers of European languages: The verb comes first.
90
¯¯ Austronesian languages often duplicate words for various meanings.

In Indonesian, rumah rumah means ‘houses’ or ‘a bunch of houses.’
Duplication can also apply to a single syllable of a word (usually the
first one) and create new meanings. For instance, in Tagalog, bili
means ‘buy’ while bi-bili means ‘will buy.’
Origins
¯¯ Given its distribution, one might assume that Austronesian originated
in Indonesia, in the South Seas, or perhaps on the Asian continent.
However, a family originated where it is the most diverse today because
there has been the longest period there for languages to become
distinct from one another.
¯¯ By that rule, Austronesian must have spread from the small island
of Taiwan because it consists of four subfamilies, three of which are
on Taiwan. These Formosan languages once numbered 25, and the
diversity among them is greater than among Austronesian languages
elsewhere.
¯¯ Further evidence for this is that Austronesian speakers from Asia to

Oceania make a cloth out of pounding bark, and one of the trees used
for this is the paper mulberry. The paper mulberry used by most of
these people traces genetically to a variety that originated in Taiwan.
The family may have actually originated on the coast of southern
China, but the spread would have been from Taiwan.
Malagasy
¯¯ Austronesian languages were spread to a considerable degree via
sailing from one island to another, often over great distances. For
example, one Austronesian language is spoken as far afield as Africa:
Malagasy. Note that it has Austronesian cognates.
91
¯¯ Genetically, the Malagasy people

are a mix of Austronesian and
Bantu, with later admixture of
Indian laborers. The Malagasy
also retain various Austronesian
cultural traditions such as
reliance on canoes, burying the
dead in canoes, and aspects of
music and dance.
¯¯ The point of departure has been traced to Borneo: Malagasy is an

offshoot of the Barito languages spoken there. The first migration
to Madagascar was sometime in the early centuries AD. (The first
unequivocal evidence of people is 490 AD.)
Language Migration
¯¯ From Taiwan, Austronesian speakers
sailed first to the Philippines. One
indication of this is that Austronesian
words—other than the ones from the
Formosan languages—trace back
to proto-language words for taro,
breadfruit, banana, coconut, and other
items indigenous to the Philippines
and the surrounding region.
¯¯ The dominant language of the Philippines is Tagalog, or Filipino. It is

one of about 120 languages of these islands, acquiring its present-day
status because it was indigenously spoken in the area of Manila.
¯¯ The migration next moved farther southward and created another

large group of languages. The most influential one became Malay,
known in its modern standardized version as Indonesian. Indonesian is
now spoken as a lingua franca by about 200 million people. Javanese is
a close relative.
92
Indonesian and Javanese are among the 20 most widely spoken

languages in the world.
¯¯ Indonesian is one of the few languages of the world that does not have
a great many prefixes, suffixes, or other constructions that distinguish
subjects from objects or mark gender, number, or tense, and so on. It
also does not feature tonal distinctions. That is because it has been a
language of trade.
¯¯ When Austronesian speakers spread throughout the Philippines and

Indonesian areas starting about 6,000 years ago, there were already
people living on the islands of the area. Thus, Austronesian languages
took on many words and even aspects of grammatical structure from
these other languages.
SUGGESTED READING
Adelaar and Himmelmann, eds., The Austronesian

Languages of Asia and Madagascar.
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
93
LECTURE 21
Languages of
the South Seas II
This lecture continues the course’s

discussion of languages of the South Seas.
A particular area of focus is the Polynesian
languages, which emerged only within the
past millennium. Languages in this group
include Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, Maori,
and Hawaiian. The Polynesian languages
are part of the Oceanic branch of the
Austronesian language family.
94
Lecture 21 Languages of the South Seas II
The Polynesian Languages

¯¯ The earliest people of the Polynesian culture were on Samoa and
Tonga. Starting in about 1200 BC, they sailed in canoes, reaching as
far eastward as Tahiti by about 100 AD. At this point, westward winds
blocked canoe travel.
¯¯ Ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl argued that the people who settled

Polynesia more plausibly came from the west coast of South America.
However, it has been discovered that between 1140 and 1260, the
direction of the winds shifted amidst a temporary change in world
climate, which allowed the settlement of New Zealand, Easter Island,
and probably Hawaii.
95
¯¯ Because the Polynesian languages have been separate for so little time,
they are quite alike. Take, for example, their corresponding words
meaning ‘bird’ and ‘canoe,’ shown below:
TONGAN SAMOAN TAHITIAN MAORI HAWAIIAN ENGLISH
manu manu manu manu manu bird

vaka va’a va’a waka wa’a canoe
¯¯ During the migration of the Polynesians, they left behind peoples who
stayed put at the islands reached along the way. These are today’s
Melanesians and Micronesians closer to the east coast of Australia.
¯¯ The Polynesian languages’ parent group, Austronesian, consists of four

subfamilies. Three are spoken on Taiwan. The fourth includes all other
Austronesian languages.
¯¯ That fourth subfamily consists of three branches: a western one that

includes Tagalog and Indonesian, a central one that includes Timor’s
lingua franca Tetun, and then an eastern branch in the South Pacific.
The eastern branch is the Oceanic branch.
Oceanic Sounds
¯¯ Oceanic languages have some of the smallest numbers of sounds of
any languages of the world. For example, Hawaiian has only the five
basic vowels a, e, i, o, and u, plus the consonants p, t, m, n, h, l, w, and a
glottal stop.
¯¯ Oceanic languages also tend to have relatively simple syllables,

consisting mostly of consonant-vowel chunks without many consonant
clusters. This leads to interesting renditions of words from languages
like English. In Hawaiian, Christmas is Kalikimaka.
96
¯¯ Languages with so few sounds, and therefore so few possible syllables,

tend to have longer words, as multisyllabic combinations are necessary
to have a vocabulary of perceptibly distinct words. Thus, Hawaiian
famously refers to one type of fish as the humuhumunukunukuapua’a.
¯¯ That begs the question: Why would any languages end up having so
few sounds? One proposal is that as groups split off, they will naturally
carry slightly less of the original language’s equipment with them, with
there being fewer people to use and reinforce the entire body of what
the language consists of. This would include sounds.
¯¯ Evidence for this is that the click languages of Africa, probably

descendants of the world’s first language, have the most sounds of any
languages in the world. The Polynesian languages were the world’s last
languages to form, created by small groups leaving their homelands. It
may not be a coincidence that it is here that languages have the fewest
sounds in world.
Oceanic Language Components

¯¯ The Oceanic languages feature interesting pronoun setups. It may be
hard for an English speaker to imagine that a language wouldn’t have
a regular way of distinguishing he and she, but a great many make no
such distinction regularly. Then, there are languages that have a much
finer array of pronouns than an English speaker might imagine, like
the Melanesian language Kwaio.
¯¯ The term for we in Kwaio differs according to whether the speaker

means to say “me and you” or “me and them.” Then, instead of there
just being one set of plural pronouns, there are three, depending on
whether one means two, three (or four), or more. Refer to the video or
audio lesson for a further breakdown on this topic.
97
¯¯ Oceanic languages are also more specific when it comes to possession

than English. For example, take the Maori words for grandparent and
grandchild: tupuna and mokopuna. The way to say “my grandparent”
is tōku tupuna. Therefore,
one might assume that to MAORI ENGLISH
say “my grandchild,” the
tupuna grandparent
correct choice would be tōku
mokopuna. However, this is mokopuna grandchild
not the case. There is actually tōku tupuna my grandparent
a different form of my when
tāku mokopuna my grandchild
used with grandchild.
¯¯ This is one of the subtler aspects of grammar in languages like Maori

(and other Polynesian ones, which have this feature). There are efforts
to revive Maori and Hawaiian, and one of the most challenging
features for learners to master is which form of possessive marking
nouns use.
SUGGESTED READING
Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki.
Lynch, Ross, and Crowley, The Oceanic Languages.
98
LECTURE 22
Siberia and Beyond:

Language Isolates
The Russian language is not indigenous

to Siberia, and there are four patches of
the area where languages are spoken
that are not related to one another. For
convenience, these are referred to as the
Paleosiberian languages, but this does
not refer to a group of related languages.
They and other languages are a good
introduction to the topic of language
isolates, the subject of this lecture.
99
Lecture 22 Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates
Paleosiberian Overview
¯¯ Among the Paleosiberian languages,
only one group constitutes an
actual family: the small Chukotko-
Kamchatkan cluster. This is a
handful of languages spoken by small
groups, under threat from Russian.
¯¯ One of them, Itelmen, has ejectives.

This is very rare in this part of the
world, and it has been suggested that
this came from languages spoken here even before. Specifically, many
Native American languages of the Pacific Northwest have ejectives.
¯¯ Yukaghir covers two different languages spoken by groups that lead

different lifestyles. Yukaghir may be related distantly to Uralic.
Additionally, Nivkh is a single language spoken much further to the
south, and Ket is a single language spoken further to the west.
¯¯ These languages represent an earlier layer of language in this area,

before the arrival of languages such as Russian, Uralic, and Turkic.
They also allude to the fact that many languages of the world do not
classify into families, and are instead isolates.
¯¯ Sometimes, isolates are identifiably part of former families, such

as Ket. Other times, linguists have lost all indication of what the
language’s relatives may have been.
Ket
¯¯ Ket is spoken today by only a few hundred people natively, on the
banks of the Yenisei River in central Russia. It is related to no other
languages today. The language is very complicated grammatically.
100
¯¯ Ket is a lone survivor of the spread of other languages. Its speakers live
in a swampy area that would have been less attractive to the nomadic
people who otherwise spread westward and eliminated indigenous
groups across Siberia.
¯¯ Ket also once had relatives—that is, it was one member of a family.
Linguists recorded several languages, now extinct, that were related
to it. Thus, Ket is today an isolate, but is the sole survivor of what was
once a family called Yeniseian.
Ainu
¯¯ Among the languages called Paleosiberian, some linguists also include
a language isolate of Japan called Ainu. Its inclusion occurs because
it was once spoken not only in much of Japan but as far north as
Sakhalin Island. That it does not happen to be spoken on the mainland
is a flimsy reason for not including it from the Paleosiberian scattering.
¯¯ Ainu has been essentially exterminated by Japanese. Today, almost

no native speakers survive, with most speakers only knowing it as a
second language and themselves advancing rapidly in age. Ainu varied
enough across its homeland that some consider it to have been a family
of different languages, now reduced to a single one that had served as a
general standard.
¯¯ Grammatically, Ainu parallels Altaic in a general sense, just as

Japanese and Korean do. However, this may well be because of sharing
(language contact) rather than common ancestry, and Ainu cannot be
shown to have any living relatives.
¯¯ Ainu is one of many languages that reveal that a language doesn’t need
writing to have a literature. There were lengthy oral epics in Ainu,
usually performed by women.
101
LANGUAGE ISOLATES ACROSS THE WORLD
There are language isolates worldwide. Many Native American

languages have, or had, no known relatives. Additionally, there
is a language straddling India and Pakistan called Burushaski
that is structurally unlike any Indo-European or even Dravidian
language, and is related to no other living languages.
The first known writing is in an ancient language of the Middle

East called Sumerian, which, despite its central role in the history
of language and humanity, was related to no known language
of the past or present. It too qualifies as a language isolate.
Basque
¯¯ There is only one language
isolate in Europe, Basque,
which straddles southwestern
France and northeastern Spain.
Its grammar is quite unlike that
of Indo-European languages.
¯¯ Like Ket, Basque was once

more widespread and likely
was one member of a family of
similar languages. The word
Basque is a cognate of the word
Gascony, referring to an area of
France containing, but larger
than, the area where Basque is
spoken today.
102
¯¯ There are inscriptions of a language spoken in this area until perhaps

the early Middle Ages, which are clearly a precursor or relative of
Basque. For example, Basque for man is gizon, and in in Aquitanian
inscriptions, the word is gison.
¯¯ Basque has successfully fought for coexistence with French and Spanish.
However, it is a survivor of an onslaught from Indo-European speakers
millennia ago, a single branch alive of what was once a family tree.
Etruscan
¯¯ Before Latin emerged and spread in Italy, the language spoken there
was Etruscan. Etruscan civilization was a sophisticated monarchy with
a literature. The Roman Empire built upon the Etruscan civilization
that had been in the area previously.
¯¯ Etruscan is known from about 13,000 inscriptions in a Greek-derived

alphabet. Because some of them have accompanying translations into,
for example, Greek, the language is partially known. Etruscan left
words such as military, column, people, and tuba.
¯¯ Etruscan neatly shows that language is inherently complicated, rather

than only having become so with the emergence of modernity. It had
ample case marking and rules like son being clan but sons being clenar.
¯¯ Language isolates can often be assumed to be remnants of what once

was a whole family. Etruscan demonstrates this: There are a few
scantily attested ancient languages of Europe that Etruscan resembles
too closely to be accidental. There was likely a family, today called
Tyrsenian, that Etruscan was one member of.
SUGGESTED READING
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.
103
LECTURE 23
Creole Languages
Social history has dictated that sometimes a

people are forced to first create a makeshift
kind of speech that isn’t full language, and
then build this into a real language. That
creates a language that is truly a new
one. Linguists call such a creation a creole
language. This lecture looks at several
examples of creole languages.
104
Lecture 23 Creole Languages
Tok Pisin
¯¯ When white people settled Australia, a makeshift language, or a
pidgin, developed between them and the local inhabitants. This way
of speaking came to be used between English speakers and other
people encountered during the colonization of the islands eastward
of Australia, and eventually, as a lingua franca between speakers of
different indigenous languages.
¯¯ Used extensively for decades, what was once a primitive pidgin became
a full language—that is, a creole. There are various dialects of this new
language; the one used in Papua New Guinea is called Tok Pisin. This
language did not exist until the 19th century. It is genuinely a new one.
¯¯ In Tok Pisin, words can have very different meanings than in English.
Sapos, from the word suppose, means ‘if.’ Meanwhile, save is from the
Portuguese saber and means ‘know.’
Jamaican Creole
¯¯ Many creoles formed when African slaves were transported to
European-run plantations. This is why the English of Jamaica is so
distinct from Standard English. For example, below is a sentence from
a folktale known as “William Saves His Sweetheart” along with its
translation.
Unu sii dat tida gyal de kom ya, unu main mi tings, no tiek non gi im.
“If you see that other girl coming here, you watch my things,
don’t bring any to her.”
¯¯ The term unu is a word meaning ‘you all’ in the African language
Igbo. The use of the words take and give to mean ‘bring’ comes from
the way that certain African languages string verbs together in the
same way.
105
¯¯ The term tida, meaning ‘other,’ spawned because the colloquial British
for “the other” can be pronounced “t’other.” Creoles often reveal
features of varieties of a language that are otherwise less known.
French, Spanish, and Portuguese Creoles

¯¯ There are also creoles based on French. Haitian is one of them. There
was also until recently a French creole language spoken by descendants
of African slaves in Louisiana.
¯¯ There lives another such creole on the island of Mauritius near

Madagascar in Africa. It shows how a creole makes a real vocabulary
from just a few words. In French, the words foie (‘liver’), foi (‘faith’),
and fois (‘time’) are
all pronounced the
same. However, in ENGLISH FRENCH MAURITIAN
Mauritian, these
liver le foie lefwa
words come out with
the article fused to faith la foi lafwa
two of them, so that time fois fwa
all three are different.
¯¯ In Mauritian, lefwa does not mean ‘the liver,’ but just ‘liver.’ The term
meaning ‘the liver’ is lefwa-la, with the article added. (In Mauritian,
the article comes after, not before, the noun).
¯¯ Additionally, there are creoles based on Spanish, such as Papiamentu

in Curaçao, and Portuguese, such as the Cape Verdean language.
Cape Verdean shows another way that a new language builds a
vocabulary—through the process of reduplication, where a duplicated
form of a word has a related-but-different meaning from the root.
For example, in Cape Verdean, peli means ‘skin’ while pelipeli means
‘stark naked.’
106
Complexity
¯¯ Creoles are less complex than older languages, but they still have
complexities. For example, the verb be in Saramaccan—a creole
based on English, Portuguese, and two African languages spoken in
Surinam—is more complex than English’s.
¯¯ If a speaker says, “I am Jacob,” then the speaker uses the form da.
However, if the speaker discusses possession and says that something is
theirs or someone else’s, then there is no be word necessary at all. Yet, if
the speaker stresses that
something is theirs or
someone else’s—as if to SARAMACCAN ENGLISH
say, “The dog is mine!”— Mi da Jacob. I am Jacob.
then a different form of
Dí dágu u mi. The dog is mine.
be is used than in neutral
sentences. U mí a dí dágu! The dog is mine!
SUGGESTED READING
McWhorter, What Language Is.

Sebba, Contact Languages.
107
LECTURE 24
Why Are There So Many

Languages in New Guinea?
This lecture focuses on the languages of

the island of New Guinea. Today, New
Guinea is politically divided between a
western half consisting of two provinces
of Indonesia—formerly called Irian
Jaya—and an eastern half which is an
independent nation called Papua New
Guinea.
108
Lecture 24 Why Are There So Many Languages in New Guinea?
Background on New Guinea

¯¯ Humans arrived on New Guinea perhaps 70,000 years ago. The
terrain is alternately mountainous, jagged, or swampy, and the coast
has many islands, making groups relatively isolated from one another.
This situation, where language has been morphing among groups
who have been relatively separate from one another’s languages, has
led to New Guinea being perhaps the most linguistically rich spot on
the planet.
¯¯ There are 750 Papuan languages, plus 200 or so Austronesian

languages on the coasts, from when Austronesian speakers migrated
on their way eastward. Most of these languages are spoken by a few
hundred to a few thousand people.
¯¯ The Papuan languages are not a single family. Rather, there are about
two dozen families of languages, plus many isolates. About half of the
languages do constitute a family called Trans-New Guinea, however.
The families in New Guinea are a patchwork on the island, many as
different from one another as Indo-European is from Uralic or Sino-
Tibetan is from Austronesian.
¯¯ A better term for Papuan languages might be simply non-Austronesian,

especially as some Papuan languages are spoken westward in
Indonesia, while others are spoken eastward of New Guinea in the
Solomon Islands.
109
Tracking Relationships
¯¯ For tens of millennia, these languages have been diverging, mixing,
going extinct, and changing constantly. This makes it practically
impossible to chart the historical relationships between these languages
in the way that one can with Indo-European ones.
¯¯ The languages have been ENGLISH I you he/she

diverging for so very long UNA na kan er
that often, the only evidence EKAGI na ka e
of original relationships is in MIANMIN na ka a
pronouns alone. Pronouns OKSAPMIN no-g go o-g
from various languages
BOSAVI ne ge e
of the Trans-New Guinea
GENDE na ka ya
family are shown in the table
ONJOB na ga me
at right.
¯¯ That separate languages would have the same sound pattern in

these pronouns is difficult to ascribe to chance, and languages don’t
borrow pronouns easily like this. Still, this is some of the only evidence
that conclusively reveals the relatedness of these languages. The
resemblances probably reflect that about 70,000 years ago, people
reached New Guinea and populated it rather rapidly.
Characterizing a Papuan Language

¯¯ To characterize a Papuan language beyond the pronouns is difficult,
given the amount of variation. However, there are a few very common
features among them. Papuan languages tend to have only a basic set
of five or so vowels, and a few of them rival the Polynesian languages
for the most vowel-low languages in the world.
¯¯ Additionally, in many of these languages, when the subject changes

as the speaker talks about something, it is indicated not only with the
pronoun itself, but also with a marker that announces that the subject
will now change.
110
¯¯ Most Papuan languages have the verb at the end of the sentence. Given
how natural it feels for the verb to be in the middle to an English
speaker, it’s easy to suppose that this order is somehow the default.
However, verb-final languages are actually slightly more common. The
default status of that order in a place like New Guinea makes it seem
more plausible that subject-object-verb is the default order in language,
as many linguists believe, possibly tracing back to the first language.
Unusual Traits
¯¯ In a place where so very many languages have been developing for
such a very long time, the languages often challenge an English
speaker’s very sense of how a language could work. These languages
can indeed surprise with what they lack.
ww In Berik, for example, there is one word for he, she, it, and they, as well
as for both singular and plural you. This means there is only a plural
pronoun in the first person, as in we.
ww In the Mai Brat language, there are no tense markers at all. To be
specific about time, one uses actual words such as tomorrow, but there is
no grammatical way to place a verb in the past or future.
ww In the Berik language, a verb has prefixes and suffixes that specify
things like how big an object is; whether there was one, two, or three of
them; its distance; and the specific time of day.
¯¯ Most verbs in the Yele languge change shape in a random way that
simply has to be learned depending on tense and other shades of
meaning. Yele has 90 different sounds, over 1,000 prefixes and suffixes,
and 11 different ways of saying on,
depending on whether something
SUGGESTED READING
is on a horizontal surface, a
vertical surface, and so on.
Foley, The Papuan Languages
of New Guinea.
Pawley, Attenborough, Golson,
and Hide, eds., Papuan Pasts.
111
QUIZ
LECTURES 19–24
1 What is the most striking feature of the Hmong-Mien family? [19]
2 What factor made members of the Tai-Kadai family Sinospheric? [19]
3 What is the main language of the Philippines? [20]
4 Where is it most likely that the Austronesian group originated? [20]
5 What is the parent group of the Polynesian languages? [21]
6 Why do Oceanic languages trend toward having longer words? [21]
112
7 What is a language isolate? [22]
8 What is Europe’s only known language isolate? [22]
9 Are creoles full languages? [23]
10 Where is Tok Pisin primarily spoken? [23]
11 How many language families make up the Papuan languages? [24]
12 What trait do many Papuan languages share with Polynesian

languages? [24]
113
LECTURE 25
The Languages
of Australia I
Australia was formerly home to about

250 different languages. Today, only
about 150 of them are spoken at all, and
only about a dozen are being passed
on to generations of children. Thus, the
story of Australia’s languages is largely a
matter of recounting a bygone situation
than a current one, as English has all but
exterminated the original diversity of
languages on the continent.
114
Lecture 25 The Languages of Australia I
Vocabulary in Alternate Situations

¯¯ The Australian languages do not constitute members of a single
Australian family; rather, they constitute over two dozen families.
Sorting out these families and reconstructing what the Proto-
Australian language was like is extremely difficult.
¯¯ A staple of many Australian cultures has been the use of special

alternate vocabularies in certain situations. Serving as an example is
the Lardil language, which was spoken on an island off of the northern
coast. During a male initiation ceremony, a special language called
Damin was used.
¯¯ Damin consisted of many fewer words than Lardil had—only about

150—used with Lardil grammar. For example, Damin’s only pronouns
were one for me and another for not me. Damin also had clicks, making
it the only speech variety in the world with clicks outside of the click
languages in Africa.
¯¯ Similarly, the Queensland language Dyirbal used a similar alternate

vocabulary with in-laws and cousins because they were within the
circles of people who one might marry or be an in-law to. Thus, it was
thought best to avoid contact with close relatives within that circle.
Reconstruction Difficulties
¯¯ In Australian language usage, there has been comfort with a high
degree of word substitution. This general tendency has extended
to permanent, as opposed to ceremonial, usage. For example,
intermarriage between groups has been quite common, leading to a
great deal of multilingualism and language mixture.
¯¯ The languages Ngandi and Rithargu are from different families.

However, Ngandi shares more vocabulary with Ritharngu than with
its own relatives, such as Nunngubuyu.
115
¯¯ Considering that humans reached Australia about 65,000 years

ago, with change having taken place over that entire period, tracing
the relationships of these languages is a massive undertaking. It is
especially difficult in Australia to decide whether features languages
share are due to common ancestry or later influence.
Family Tree Fundamentals

¯¯ There are very few words common enough among all Australian
languages to be seen as protowords. Some of the few are nga (meaning
‘I’), bu (meaning ‘hit’), na (meaning ‘see’), and wo (meaning ‘give’).
¯¯ It is possible that there was not a single Proto-Australian language

but several, especially given that New Guinea and Australia were
contiguous until about 10,000 years ago. Nevertheless, there is no
family likeness between the Papuan languages of New Guinea and
those in Australia.
¯¯ A family of languages called Pama-Nyungan occupies most of the

Australian continent. The name comes from words for man in two of
the subfamilies. A segment of the north contains about two dozen other
families within a relatively small area. These are referred to as non-
Pama-Nyungan, but this is a description rather than a family name.
The relationships between the non-Pama-Nyungan families are still
being worked out.
¯¯ Based on this distribution, it would

appear that the first Australians
migrated from the north, such that
in that area, languages have had
the longest to diversify. This would
correspond to the fact that humans
would have encountered Australia
while travelling southward from
Indonesia and New Guinea.
116
¯¯ The Pama-Nyungan family represents a more recent spread, such that

the languages are more alike than the non-Pama-Nyungan ones in the
north. Pama-Nyungan languages are quite different from one another,
but the family has been established on the basis of commonalities of
vocabulary and some in grammar.
¯¯ The family relationship is not as cleanly evident as that of Indo-

European languages. However, Australia demonstrates that it is
unrealistic to expect the Indo-European degree of detail in, perhaps,
most language families.
Australian Language Traits

¯¯ Despite their diversity, Australian languages, partly because of endless
contact, tend to exhibit certain traits across the continent. They
tend to have relatively few vowels, often just a, i, and u. Additionally,
Australian languages often lack the “hissy” sounds like /f/, /s/, and /sh/,
as opposed to “stop” sounds like /p/, /t/, and /k/, and nasal ones like /m/
and /n/.
¯¯ Word order in many Australian languages is largely free. The words

can be in any order, except the word corresponding to is.
SUGGESTED READING
Dixon, Australian Languages.

———— , Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law
style, and Other Grammatical Wonders.
117
LECTURE 26
The Languages
of Australia II
Various features of the Australian

languages give a sense of how many
different ways there are to be a language.
Sometimes, they even show how many very
different ways there are of being human
in the bargain. These languages are very
different from each other, but there are still
certain hallmarks of Australian languages.
118
Lecture 26 The Languages of Australia II
Unique Features
¯¯ In many Australian languages, there are very few verbs. For example,
in Jingulu of the Northern Territory, there are only three verbs: come,
do, and go.
¯¯ The Guugu Yimithirr language of Queensland is distinctive first in having

been the first Australian language documented by Europeans. However,
the language is also interesting in that speakers do not think of things
being in front of, behind, to the left of, and to the right of them. Instead,
they think of objects as always being to the north, south, west, and east.
¯¯ If a tree is in front of them and to the north, then they say it is north of
them. Even when they turn around, they do not say it’s behind them;
they still say it is to the north. This trait is connected to flat geography,
in which case it is useful to keep careful track of geographical
direction. Speakers of the language tend not to use this feature when
living in towns.
¯¯ Australian languages usually mark subjects in two ways: one for when
there is an object in the sentence and one for when there isn’t. This
means that these languages keep track overtly of whether a subject is
acting on something or just undergoing something. This is called an
ergative language.
Dyirbal Language Features

¯¯ The features of the Dyirbal CLASS 1 men, kangaroos,
language serve as an interesting possums, bats, most
animals
case study of the Australian
languages. Dyirbal has four noun CLASS 2 women, fire, water,
stinging animals, some
classifiers, which subdivide people other animals
and things in an interesting way.
CLASS 3 fruit and the trees that
The classifiers are bayi, balan, bear them
balam, and bala. They mark four
CLASS 4 inanimate objects and
classes of noun. everything else
119
¯¯ There are four reasons a language would split nouns up that way:
1 Change over time. In an earlier stage of Dyirbal, there were many

more classifiers that subdivided things into more categories, such as
water, animals in general, stinging animals, and so on.
2 Folklore, in which the Sun is thought of as female.
3 Semantic extensions: With the Sun as female, it is natural to think

of fire as female as well, as well as the burning sensation from
being stung.
4 Resemblances in sound.
¯¯ The Dyirbal described above is actually extinct. The Dyirbal spoken

by young people today uses a simplified system. Such simplification
processes can occur naturally, but when they happen to such a degree
within a short period of time, it is a sign that the language is no longer
being used in its full, original form.
Mixed Languages
¯¯ Another way that Australian languages change under modern
conditions and threat from other languages is to evolve into mixed
languages. Both creole languages—which grow from pidgins—and
outright mixture have occurred in Australia.
¯¯ When Europeans reached Australia, a pidgin English developed,

which evolved into several creoles. One of them was Tok Pisin.
However, another variety developed on Australia itself, and soon was
used between Aboriginal groups themselves as a lingua franca. This
language is called Kriol and is still used by Aboriginals.
¯¯ Today, young people’s version of Australian languages mixes words

and grammar from this Kriol and the indigenous language, creating
what is essentially a new language.
120
The Tasmanian Languages

¯¯ One story remaining is that of the languages of Tasmania, an island
southwards of Australia. The island has been separated from Australia
for about 12,000 years. Europeans documented about 12 languages
spoken there. They only transcribed words and sometimes very
basic grammar, and the actual names of the languages are lost. The
Tasmanian languages consisted of about three distinct families.
¯¯ Those languages were only spoken until the 1830s. The English largely
exterminated the indigenous people and relocated those left to Flinders
Island, where a mixed version of the Tasmanian languages developed.
That, too, is long extinct. Some form of Tasmanian language, possibly
this mixed version, was recorded in 1903 by an indigenous woman
born on Flinders Island.
¯¯ The Tasmanian languages are not a farther group of Australian

languages—they are quite unlike them. This likely sheds light on an
earlier situation in Australia. Human languages have been spoken
there for about 65,000 years, while Pama-Nyungan languages are
closely enough related that the family cannot have existed for longer
than several thousand years.
¯¯ Thus, it is likely the Pama-Nyungan speakers spread throughout most

of Australia relatively recently, overtaking what would have been
innumerable languages spoken there originally. Most of Australia’s
linguistic map may have been as dense with distinct languages and
families as the non-Pama-Nyungan region in the north is today. The
Tasmanian situation
may have reflected this
original situation, with
its dozen languages of SUGGESTED READING
three families spoken
on an island not much Dixon, Australian Languages.
bigger than Ireland. ———— , Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law
style, and Other Grammatical Wonders.
121
LECTURE 27
The Original
American Languages I
Before the arrival of white people in North

America, there were about 300 distinct
languages spoken. About 200 of those
languages are no longer spoken, about 50 are
barely hanging on, and only about a dozen
will likely be spoken by 2050. That dozen
includes Navajo, Cree, Ojibwe, Inuktitut, Hopi,
Lakhota, Choctaw, and Apache. However,
within the United States, about half of speakers
of Native American languages are Navajo
speakers, of which there are about 170,000.
Roughly 350,000 total people speak any
Native American language.
122
Lecture 27 The Original American Languages I
Migration History
¯¯ The most recent research suggests that Native Americans’ ancestors
migrated from northeastern Asia (Siberia) across to modern-day
Alaska. What is today the Bering Strait was a landmass linking Asia
and North America, termed Beringia. Archaeological, biological,
and genetic evidence suggest that around 1,000 Asians migrated to
Beringia about 23,000 years ago, but were blocked from crossing to
North America by ice for several thousand years.
¯¯ About 15,000 years ago, the ice melted and allowed passage into North
America. There is controversy as to whether the migrants spread via
land, through the middle of North America and southward, or entered
the continents from the Pacific coast.
¯¯ Archaeological evidence of the Clovis culture, typified by a type of

arrowhead and other tools, dates from around 13,000 years ago at
various sites in North America. This represents the earliest settlements
of Native Americans.
¯¯ The El Monte site in southern Chile possibly complicates this account

in that it has remains of human habitation that date to almost 15,000
years ago. This would be too early for a migration that supposedly
began at that point in Alaska.
Family Relationships
¯¯ Native American languages exhibit massive diversity. Predictably, their
classification has been difficult and quite controversial.
¯¯ The so-called textbook account recounts that linguist Joseph

Greenberg proposed in 1987 that Native American languages fell
into three families: one composed of Arctic languages spoken by the
Inuit, called Eskimo-Aleut; another spreading from Alaska down
to the American Southwest that includes Navajo, called Na-Dene;
and another including all of the hundreds of other languages, called
Amerind.
123
¯¯ However, historical linguists have almost universally rejected this

system. Rather, it is agreed that Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene are
families, but that what Greenberg classified as Amerind really
comprises a great many separate, unrelated families.
The Amerind Controversy

¯¯ Greenberg’s evidence for Amerind being a family was based on a
tendency among these languages for words for I to contain the letter
n and words for you (in the singular) to contain the letter m. Other
linguists have claimed that the number of Native American languages
with this pattern could be a matter of chance, especially given that
languages might borrow pronouns and that pronouns in general tend
to use nasal sounds.
¯¯ Additionally, a disciple of Greenberg’s, Merrit Ruhlen, has noticed

that many so-called Amerind languages have words for child, son or
brother, and daughter or sister that seem to suggest an original set. Most
specialists on Native American languages reject this as evidence that
Amerind is a family.
¯¯ They are correct in terms of the technical definition of what a

language family is: The Amerind languages cannot be shown to have
descended from a single protolanguage via regular sound changes the
way Proto-Indo-European can. There is no set of cognates that all
or most of these languages share in common. There is no complex of
grammatical features the Amerind languages have in common, either.
¯¯ However, given how small the Beringian population was, it is quite

plausible that the Native American languages stem from a small
number of original languages. Here, it is relevant that speakers of
Eskimo-Aleut languages and Na-Dene languages have a distinct
genetic imprint different from that of speakers of the other Native
American languages. It is possible that the latter languages descended
from a single original one.
124
¯¯ Despite that, after such a long period of time, the likenesses between
these languages would have diluted to such a degree that a family
relationship could only be dimly perceptible. Thus, the Amerind
languages are probably descendants from a single source. However,
that probably does not render them a family at this late date.
¯¯ Rather, in the conventional sense, there are about 10 major families

of Native American languages. The Amerind group is about eight
families, rather than a single family. There are also about 20 other
smaller families and various isolates.
125
Na-Dene
¯¯ The Na-Dene family includes Navajo as well as Apache, a similar
language, and less well-known languages spoken to the north. Most of
the languages belong to a subfamily called Athabaskan.
¯¯ This family is unique in that it has

become increasingly accepted that ENGLISH KET NAVAJO
it traces to speakers of the Yeniseian foot ki s
ʔ
kee’
languages like Ket. There are many
stone tə s
ʔ
tsé
words that are unexpectedly similar,
such as the words for foot and stone.
¯¯ Additionally, Ket and Navajo are dazzlingly complex in similar ways.

In Ket, words often sandwich together assorted elements of meaning
indicated with often a single sound. Navajo operates in a similar
fashion. Another similarity is that both languages have tones.
¯¯ Navajo and the other Na-Dene languages are useful in showing that
indigenous languages tend to be more, not less, complex than written
ones. In Navajo, verbs are all irregular. The forms differ according to
tense and other factors in ways different for each verb. For instance,
below are five different versions of the term for carry.
PRESENT PAST FUTURE REPETITIVE SUBJUNCTIVE

teeh tį tééł tééh tééł
SUGGESTED READING
Mithun, The Languages of Native North America.

Ruhlen, The Origin of Language.
126
LECTURE 28
The Original
American Languages II
This lecture and the next cover some of

the larger families of North America and
some lessons they teach about language in
general. The Eskimo-Aleut languages, the
Algonquian languages, and the Penutian
family are areas of focus in this lecture.
127
Lecture 28 The Original American Languages II
Eskimo-Aleut
¯¯ The Eskimo-Aleut languages are spoken in Alaska, northern Canada,
Greenland, and parts of eastern Siberia. In other words, this family is
spoken in and near the Arctic. This family was the last to emerge: The
first humans to inhabit the area came in a second wave from Beringia
about 5,000 years ago, and were replaced by new populations that
arrived 2,800 and then 1,000 years ago.
¯¯ This family consists not of a single language with various dialects,

but essentially three such languages, within two of which dialects are
so divergent as to essentially be different languages. Aleut is a single
language. Yupik varies considerably from one location to another,
as does the language often called Greenlandic or Inuktitut spoken
eastward.
¯¯ In Greenland and Canada, Greenlandic is a co-official language with

the dominant ones, and therefore remains a living language. However,
in Alaska and Russia, where Yupik and Aleut are afforded no such
status, the languages are all but extinct.
¯¯ These languages have unusually long words, often containing the

information English would require an entire sentence for. This is called
polysynthesis. For instance, Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga would
be the full sentence “I should stop drinking.”
Algonquian
¯¯ The Algonquian group of languages was spoken, among other places,
on the East Coast. For this reason, it is Algonquian languages that
Native Americans most familiar in American history most often
spoke. The language of Squanto at Plymouth Rock was Naragansett,
Pocahontas spoke Powhatan, and the original inhabitants of New York
spoke Munsee.
128
¯¯ Thus, many words from Native American languages in English

originated in these languages. An example is squash, which originated
in Naragansett’s askutasquash, meaning ‘thing eaten raw.’
¯¯ Interestingly, there are languages related to the Algonquian ones

spoken in northwestern California. This shows that Algonquian
languages were likely once more
widespread. It also means that
properly speaking, the family is one
that includes Algonquian and these
other languages. That family is
called Algic.
Penutian
¯¯ California is home to 78 different languages. A great many of them
belong to a family called Penutian, whose composition has been highly
controversial: It consists of what many would consider six or more
separate families.
¯¯ Even by conservative estimate, California is home to five different

language families, plus isolates suggesting there were once even
more. The question is why. One reason may be that languages in
the area were closely associated with their region, such that it was
largely forbidden to speak a language outside of its territory for
interpretational purposes.
¯¯ This discouraged languages replacing one another. It also discouraged

the lexical mixture common in, for example, Australia, and
encouraged languages to diverge from one another and even become
different ones. The West and East dialects of Greenlandic are quite
divergent for a similar reason: There was a taboo on using one
another’s words.
129
¯¯ Penutian languages illuminate the complexity of Native American

languages in showing that indigenous languages can have the case
marking best known from Indo-European languages like Latin, Greek,
and Russian.
¯¯ In these languages, intricate rules a native speaker would have

difficulty explaining are common. These are languages that speakers
were often required not to speak in school, and which are almost all as
a result now extinct.
SUGGESTED READING
Golla, California Indian Languages.
130
LECTURE 29
The Original
American Languages III
This lecture continues the course’s

discussion of original American languages.
Topics discussed include the Iroquoian
and Hokan language groups, Tanoan
languages, and the death of languages.
131
Lecture 29 The Original American Languages III
Iroquoian
¯¯ The names of many of the Iroquoian
languages—such as Cayuga, Seneca,
Oneida, Mohawk, Erie, and Huron—
suggest where this family of languages
has been spoken. Of them, only two,
Cherokee (in Oklahoma, Arkansas,
and North Carolina) and Mohawk (in
Canada and northern New York) are
viable. The others will soon be extinct.
¯¯ The relative vitality of Cherokee is due partly to the fact that it has its
own writing system. A Cherokee silversmith who spoke no English,
Sequoyah, was impressed by whites’ “talking leaves” and invented a
writing system for his language in the 1820s.
¯¯ He first tried to have separate symbols for each word, but realized
that was unwieldy. Then, he created not an alphabet but a syllabary.
Sequoyah was illiterate, however, and thus the symbols do not
correspond with their Roman values. Regardless, most Cherokee were
soon literate in their language, and a great deal of material has been
published in it.
A peculiar feature of the Iroquoian languages is that they tend not

to have consonants that require putting the lips together—that is,
there are no /p/, /b/, /f/, or /m/ sounds. Those sounds are simply
missing, despite that from a European perspective, they seem basic
to language itself. This is a highly unusual feature in terms of the
world’s languages.
132
Hokan
¯¯ Whether the West Coast’s Hokan languages
form a family is not firmly established. They
have a scattered distribution pattern. They
“feel” like several separate families, perhaps
related in the way that Amerind languages
likely are.
¯¯ However, one general Hokan trait is that

prefixes often carry richer meaning than
those in European languages. For example, in
Central Pomo, there was a range of prefixes.
The following is a list of them and what they meant:
PREFIX MEANING
sh- with a handle
cha- by slicing
h- by poking
qa- by biting
ba- orally
‘- by fine hand action, such as with the fingers
s- by sucking
ch - h
involving vegetative growth
da- by pushing with the palm
m- with heat
sha- by shaking
¯¯ Used with a verb, such as the one for mix, these prefixes were central to
rendering the vocabulary a full one. For instance, h-yól meant ‘to add
salt or pepper.’
133
A Smaller Family
¯¯ The Tanoan languages are a small family, spoken in Kansas,
Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. They provide a sense of the
degree of loss involved in the extinction of most Native American
languages in that even in such obscure corners, there are amazing
ways of constituting a language.
¯¯ Kiowa is spoken in Oklahoma, and the way it

KIOWA ENGLISH
handles the singular and plural is interesting.
If you were learning how to do the plural tâl skunk
in Kiowa, then you’d think it was pretty tâl-g skunks
straightforward from the word skunk. c’ól wings
¯¯ However, the term for wings is seemingly c’ól-g wing
confusing. What does that suffix mean if cę̂ horse
it makes a plural for skunk but a singular cę̂-g horses
for wing? The confusion would continue as thǫ́:sè bones
you learned how this suffix worked for horse
thǫ́:sè-g bone
and bone.
¯¯ In Kiowa, that suffix means roughly the opposite of the default

number. Skunks are usually encountered alone, and so the suffix
makes it plural. Wings are usually encountered in pairs, so the suffix
makes it singular. Nouns fall into classes in Kiowa in which the suffix
differs in this way.
The Death of Language

¯¯ Native American languages are useful in showing how much is lost
when a language dies in terms of how these magnificently complicated
grammatical systems gradually decay as new generations are not raised
speaking the language daily throughout their lives.
134
¯¯ Gros Ventre was an Algonquian language of Montana. Before its last

speakers passed on in the early 1980s, even they no longer spoke the
language fully. For example, the plural of duck was different, based on
using a different plural ending on the wrong word. This ending was
misused with other words as well, such as the word for pine tree.
¯¯ In the Pipil language of El Salvador, there was originally an ending

used to make the future, which today’s speakers have largely let go in
favor of using a different, easier construction. Though the new version
is easier to use, it means the language is diluted, especially with much
more of this kind of change happening throughout the language.
¯¯ Complexity could also be lost when speakers of different languages

were forced together into reservations. When English and French
speakers encountered speakers of various massively complex languages
in the Pacific Northwest, a pidgin emerged based on words from the
Chinook language and others. However, this pidgin, even when spoken
fluently to the point that it was almost an actual language, lacked
almost all of what made the indigenous ones interesting.
SUGGESTED READING
Grenoble and Whaley, eds., Endangered Languages.
135
LECTURE 30
The Original
American Languages IV
Native Americans continued their

migration beyond North America to
inhabit Central and South America as
well. There are now about seven families
local to Central America and about 15
more in South America.
136
Lecture 30 The Original American Languages IV
Whistled Speech
¯¯ As in North America, the families of Central and South America have
been diverging for too long for there to be a Central American or
South American type of language in any overarching way. However,
many languages of the Otomanguean family resemble Chinese in
having small words that are distinguished by tones.
¯¯ Speakers of these languages have often used special whistled languages

for long-distance communication. Whistled languages are found
worldwide, generally in mountainous or heavily forested locations.
¯¯ Chinantec, for instance, has seven tones, and also short and long
vowels. The syllable ta, for example, can mean many different things,
from ladder to foot to full sentences. In Chinantec, the whistled
speech is used only by men. Worldwide, these whistled varieties are
disappearing, supplanted by telephones, radio, and modern media.
Arawak and Cariban

¯¯ Two families of South America are Arawak and Cariban. Both stretch
up into the Caribbean.
¯¯ The Garifuna language of northern Central America is interesting in

two ways. First, it is Arawakan out of its normal range. Second, it has a
great deal of Cariban vocabulary.
¯¯ The reason is this: Several centuries ago, Garifuna arose on the

Caribbean islands of Dominica and St. Vincent. Men from South
America, speaking the Carib language, invaded these islands, killed
the men, and married the women, who spoke an Arawakan language.
¯¯ The women learned Carib only partly, retaining their own grammar,
and this is what they passed on to children. The result was a new
mixed language with Arawak grammar and a lot of Carib vocabulary.
137
¯¯ There were two more wrinkles.

First, for a long time, the men
used the Carib language among
themselves. Second, the Carib the
men were speaking was a pidgin
Carib, used with other groups
in South America. Therefore,
Garifuna emerged as a mixture
between a pidgin and a real
language.
South American Language Traits

¯¯ South American languages are among the world’s least completely
documented. Some groups are still all but unreached by outsiders, and
comprehensive fieldwork has begun only in recent decades.
¯¯ In many South American languages, one must be especially explicit

in indicating the sources of information one imparts. This is called
evidential marking. In a
language like Tuyuca spoken in
the Amazon of Colombia and TUYUCA MEANING
Brazil, there are five different OF SUFFIX
suffixes indicating how one
díiga apé-wi I saw him.
knows what one is stating.
For instance, take the suffixes díiga apé-ti I heard him.
shown in the table at right,
díiga apé-yi I see his shoe print on
which are used when saying, the field/his sweaty shirt
“He played soccer.” on the bed.
díiga apé-yigɨ I’ve been told.
¯¯ South America is home to the
most exotic word orders ever díiga apé-hĩyi One assumes.
discovered, which were once
considered impossible. In a few
languages, the object comes first, then the verb, and then the subject.
In the Brazilian language Hixkaryana, the way to say “A boy caught a
fish” translates roughly to “Fish caught boy”: Kana yannimmo biryekomo.
138
Lack of Numbers
¯¯ The Pirahã language of the Amazon has no words for numbers. The
word hói means ‘small amount’ and the word hoí means ‘a slightly
bigger amount,’ but they do not correspond to one and two.
¯¯ It is common for hunter-gatherer groups to have no, or very few,

numbers. This is especially common where such groups have survived
in large numbers, namely South America and Australia.
The Jarawara Language

¯¯ The Jarawara call themselves “We, the real people” in their language.
They consider their language a separate language from two others
spoken in nearby villages, which are actually varieties of the same
language, mutually intelligible with the Jarawara variety. Jarawara is
spoken only by about 170 people, and this appears to have been the
situation since very long ago.
¯¯ There are many features in the language that Westerners would not
expect. For instance, there are only four vowels: a, e, i, and an o that
sounds more like /aw/.
¯¯ There are also only 11 consonants, which lead to only so many possible
word shapes, and neither tones nor compounding have been adopted
as a solution. Instead, homonymy is simply more common than in a
European language. Mai means both ‘sun’ and ‘thunder.’ Jomee means
both ‘dog’ and ‘jaguar.’
¯¯ If no gender is specified, feminine

endings are used, not masculine. SUGGESTED READING
There are also no pronouns for
he, she, or it. Additionally, there is Dixon and Aikhenvald, eds.,
no pronoun for they, except if the The Amazonian Languages.
things are living. Everett, Language.
139
QUIZ
LECTURES 25–30
1 What is the only language to feature clicks outside of Africa’s click

languages? [25]
2 Do Australian languages trend toward higher or lower levels of word

substitution? [25]
3 How many noun classifiers does the Dyirbal language have? [26]
4 How does the Guugu Yimithirr language handle directions? [26]
5 How many distinct languages were spoken in North America before

the arrival of white people? [27]
6 How many people speak a Native American language today? [27]
140
7 How are the Eskimo-Aluet languages sometimes able to contain an

English sentence’s worth of information in a single word? [28]
8 Which of the Eskimo-Aluet languages is a co-official language in

Greenland and Canada? [28]
9 Which of the two Iroquoian languages are still viable? [29]
10 In the Hokan languages, are prefixes more or less detailed than those
in European languages? [29]
11 Have South American languages been well documented? [30]
12 What factors have led to the decline of whistled speech? [30]
141
LECTURE 31
Languages Caught
between Families
Categories in phenomena related to

human beings tend to be inherently fuzzy.
This is true of the difference between
language and dialect, and also between
language families. There are languages
that have arisen via the combination of
languages from two families, creating a
language that one could see as belonging
to both families.
142
Lecture 31 Languages Caught between Families
Examples of Language Combinations

¯¯ In Ecuador, indigenous men speaking the Native American language
Quechua learned Spanish working outside of their villages. They
spontaneously created a language expressing their new identity as
people connected both to village and urban life. This language, known
as Media Lengua, consisted of Spanish words used with prefixes and
suffixes and grammar from Quechua.
¯¯ On both sides of the American border with Canada, the offspring

of unions between French fur traders and Native American women
identified as neither French nor Cree but as both, as did their
language. Roughly, they used French nouns with Cree verbs and
much else.
¯¯ Roma in many parts of Europe developed a language for use among

themselves that used words from Romani (an Indo-Aryan language
like Hindi) with English’s grammar.
¯¯ This kind of language is rather common, and yet they have yet to
acquire an official name, even among linguists. They are often called
mixed languages, but this is too general, as all languages contain
some elements from others. It is perhaps more accurate to call them
intertwined languages.
Creoles versus Intertwined Languages

¯¯ There is a distinction between intertwined languages and creoles,
which roughly combine words from a dominant language with
grammar from the language of subordinated people forced to learn
the dominant one. The difference is that creoles grow from what start
as pidgin varieties—that is, the kind of speech produced by adults who
only know fragments of a language.
143
¯¯ As such, even when the pidgin flowers into an actual language, that
language is not simply one language’s words and another language’s
full grammar. Intertwined languages are as if two languages parented
a third language.
¯¯ The difference between Media Lengua and another contact language

based on Spanish illustrates this. Palenquero Creole Spanish is spoken
in one village in Colombia by descendants of African slaves. The slaves
spoke the Bantu language Kikongo.
¯¯ Both Spanish and Kikongo divide nouns into largely arbitrary genders
and require that the gender be marked also on adjectives, pronouns,
and so on. Both also have extensive verbal prefixes and suffixes.
However, Palenquero relies much less on these grammatical features.
It has much of Spanish’s vocabulary but not all of it, and its grammar
only faintly resembles that of Kikongo. It is relatively easy to learn the
basics of Palenquero.
¯¯ Palenquero began as a pidgin variety and grew into a new language

influenced by, but not determined by, Spanish and Kikongo. Media
Lengua, however, is cleanly made up of Spanish’s words and all of
Quechua’s grammar. It is as hard to learn Media Lengua as it is to
learn Quechua itself.
English
¯¯ English’s vocabulary is highly mixed, and the vast majority of English
words are borrowed from Norse, French, and Latin. However,
English’s grammar is also highly mixed. English inherited a portion
of its grammar from the Celtic languages spoken by the inhabitants of
England before Germanic speakers arrived.
¯¯ However, to contrast with intertwined languages, English is not simply

words from some other language (or several) superimposed on the
original grammar of English. For one, while most English words are
from the other languages, the basic ones are from English itself, like
brother, hand, fish, and so on.
144
¯¯ Additionally, English grammar is affected by Celtic but is still

essentially Germanic. This shows that mixture between language
families (and subfamilies) happens to degrees and in different ways.
Mixture itself is a norm. Intertwined languages are simply hybrids.
Creoles are the products of breakdown followed by hybridizing. The
results are different.
Speaking “In” Another Language

¯¯ A variation on this kind of family straddling is when a language retains
all of its words, but uses them grammatically in the way that another
language does, as if one were speaking a language “in” another one.
¯¯ The Tucanoan family is of South America and includes a language

called Tucano. Meanwhile, the Tariana language is from the Arawak
family, and it is essentially an Arawak language spoken in Tucanoan.
This is because its grammatical patterns are those of Tucanoan rather
than ordinary Arawak languages.
SUGGESTED READING
Bakker and Mous, Mixed Languages.

Meakins, Mixed Languages.
145
LECTURE 32
How Far Back Can

We Trace Languages?
How far back can we trace languages? Certainly,

families themselves are related in the same way
as languages and subfamilies are. Likely, all of
the world’s language families ultimately descend
through sibling relationships from a single original
language (or at most a few). However, the
exigencies of language change make it difficult to
chart languages’ relationships even within single
families.
As such, proposals for macrofamilies—proposed
language groupings—have been controversial,
with many professional linguists squarely rejecting
the very attempt to even chart such relationships.
However, it would be hard to say that the quest for
macrofamilies has not yielded any scientific success.
146
Lecture 32 How Far Back Can We Trace Languages?
An Attempt at Describing the World’s

First Language
¯¯ Linguists Merritt Ruhlen and John Bengston have made an attempt
to work out what the world’s first language would have been like, and
they have proposed a list of supposedly original words.
¯¯ For example, they propose that the first word for two would have been
pal, via comparing words in the world’s languages such as Russian’s
pol (meaning ‘half ’), Quecha’s pula (meaning ‘both’), Nubian’s bar
(meaning ‘twin’), and Malayalam’s pāl (meaning ‘part’).
¯¯ Because p and b are variations on the same sound, as are l and r, it is

easy to see the likeness between these various words and their similar
meanings. However, given the restricted number of sounds in human
language and their combinations, it is inevitable that accidental
cognates emerge between any two.
¯¯ Additionally, human language almost certainly traces back at least

100,000 years and likely much longer. The first language would
have changed immensely since then due to natural processes. For
example, the Proto-Algonquian word meaning ‘winter’ was peponwi. In
modern Cheyenne of Montana and Oklahoma, the word is the vastly
different aa’, based on natural step-by-step change patterns over just
1,500 years.
¯¯ Ruhlen and Bengston refer, where possible, to comparisons between

not just languages, but proto-languages. If relationships between
families are found, then the strongest evidence will be between the
proto-languages, at which point not as much divergence would have
happened as did when the two languages proliferated into families.
However, even here, the state of research on most protolanguages is
not as advanced as for Indo-European, and thus the research remains
problematic.
147
Many language-change specialists feel that it is futile to trace

relationships between languages farther back than about 10,000
years. This, however, can be seen as overcautious, and respectable
research suggests that certain language families of Eurasia trace
back to a single ancestor.
The Nostratic Macrofamily Proposal

¯¯ Some linguists believe that there is evidence of a Nostratic
macrofamily. Adherents differ in which families they include, but
typical members are Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic,
Kartvelian, and Dravidian. Variations on this idea include the
Paleosiberian languages and extend to Eskimo-Aleut. The proto-
language would possibly have existed 10,000–15,000 years ago in the
Fertile Crescent after the last Ice Age.
¯¯ For example, pronouns change less than most other words over time
and are not readily exchanged between languages. The pronouns in
these groups bear interesting similarities. In addition, Nostraticists
have presented many reconstructed vocabulary items.
¯¯ Researchers determining language relationships must be alert to the

difference between inherited versus borrowed features. However, under
regular conditions, languages are less likely to borrow words for core
vocabulary, except in cases where one group is especially dominant
over the other one psychologically. As such, it seems significant that
the Proto-Indo-European word for water was wed while the Proto-
Uralic one was wete. The Proto-Dravidian one was wet plus an
unknown vowel.
148
The Tai-Kadai Family

¯¯ There have long been proposals that the Tai-Kadai family, despite
being so Sinospheric in structure today, is related to Austronesian. The
evidence consists of various cognates between Tai-Kadai and Proto-
Austronesian, or more properly, the protolanguage of Austronesian
languages other than the ones spoken in Taiwan.
¯¯ The case became stronger with the discovery of a Tai-Kadai language,

Buyang, which still has words of two syllables, rather than the
Chinese-style single-syllable words. Many of its core words correspond
closely to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian words. For instance, manùk in
Buyang and manuk in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian both mean ‘bird.’
SUGGESTED READING
Campbell and Poser, Language Classification.

Ruhlen, The Origin of Language.
149
LECTURE 33
What Do Genes Say

about Language Families?
With the transcription of the human

genome, it has become possible to trace
human migration through genetic material.
Genetic research has largely confirmed
what language families suggest, while
sometimes helping resolve questions the
families’ distribution leaves unanswered,
and at other times leaving surprises.
150
Lecture 33 What Do Genes Say about Language Families?
Glottochronology
¯¯ Glottochronology is a school of thought that approaches language
change with the goal of charting relationships between families.
Linguist Morris Swadesh’s list, for example, was created within a
proposal that languages lose, on average, 14 out of 100 of the list’s
words over 1,000 years.
¯¯ This would allow linguists to calculate that related languages whose

Swadesh list words differ by 30 words have been separate for 2,000
years. Ones that differ by seven words have been separate for only 500
years, allowing for the charting of their family relationships.
¯¯ This method has been criticized as not taking into account that
languages can borrow words from one another at unrelated rates. For
example, Icelandic and Norwegian are both descendants of Old Norse.
In Icelandic, the rate of change per millennium has been about 4 in
100 words, while in Norwegian it has been about 20 per 100.
¯¯ However, this is because Norwegian has borrowed many words from

Danish and Low German. A revised version of glottochronology by
Sergei Starostin in 2002 filters out the borrowings from Norwegian
and finds that the rate was about 5 per 100 words. Hence, there are
linguists today who consider glottochronology useful in cases where it
is possible to distinguish native words from borrowings.
¯¯ In a recent controversy, glottochronology-related methods have placed

the birth of Indo-European in present-day Turkey over 8,000 years
ago. However, some specialists insist that linguistic and archaeological
analysis, which places the birthplace in the Ukrainian steppes 6,000
years ago, must be given greater weight.
151
Genetics and Europe

¯¯ Genetic research from the laboratory of David Reich at Harvard has
shown that Europeans are descended from three waves of migration,
only two of which are reflected in today’s language families. First were
the hunter-gatherers, who arrived about 40,000 years ago.
¯¯ Around 8,000 years ago, a wave of farming people from northern

Eurasia arrived, related to Siberians and Near Easterners. Finally,
starting about 5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya of the Russian steppes
arrived. They were also farmers and were technologically more
advanced than the former group.
¯¯ The Yamnaya brought the Indo-European family to Europe. The

northern Eurasian farmers would have spoken other languages. It is
impossible to know how many families these would have been, but it
is likely that Basque, unrelated to any other language today, was one
of them. The languages of the original hunter-gatherers are possibly
completely lost, although Basque people have an unusually strong
genetic imprint from them, such that Basque may be descended from
this original group.
Genetics and India

¯¯ India is occupied primarily by Indo-European languages in the north
and Dravidian languages in the south. Genetic evidence as late as the
2010s mysteriously indicated no gene flow into India within the past
12,000 or so years, but this was based only on mitochondrial evidence.
¯¯ More recently, Y-chromosome evidence from 20 different groups in

and around India has shown, instead, that people from the Caspian
Sea area arrived in India about 4,000 years ago. The evidence suggests
that the invaders were mostly men. Dravidian languages are scattered
somewhat northward; the new data supports the idea that Dravidian
speakers were indeed the original inhabitants, displaced by Indo-
Aryan speakers.
152
¯¯ Some have speculated that Dravidian speakers only later migrated

northward amidst Indo-Aryan speakers, but there is ancient genetic
Indo-Aryan and Dravidian mixture throughout India, suggesting
that Dravidians were the original inhabitants even in the north. This
joins evidence from inscriptions of the Indus Valley civilization of
northwestern India that the Indo-Aryan migration seems to have
displaced. Linguists have hypothesized that the inscriptions are in a
Dravidian language.
Genetics and Family Clusters

¯¯ There are two main areas in which cultural unity suggests a single
language family but the languages themselves are too dissimilar to
be grouped that way, actually evidencing multiple distinct families.
Genetic data has given reason to suppose that in both cases, there may
have been a single family that became several.
¯¯ The click languages constitute three families that show distinct

structural patterns and vocabularies, and some specialists hypothesize
that the clicks emerged in one family and then spread to the others
via contact rather than shared ancestry. However, a study by Jennifer
Baker, Charles Rotimi, and Daniel Shriner shows that the speakers
of all three families share a genetic imprint. That the clicks would
only have spread from one family to exactly the two whose speakers
were akin to them—and not to other surrounding languages—is a less
economical explanation than that one original family with clicks gave
birth to several.
¯¯ Similarly, among the languages of the Caucasus, the Northwestern

and Northeastern families have been shown to have some kinship, but
the Kartvelian group has seemed unrelated. Genetic analysis shows a
kinship between speakers of all three.
153
Genetics and Polynesia

¯¯ The Austronesian family includes a subgroup called Oceanic, within
which there are the Micronesian, Melanesian, and Polynesian groups.
The Polynesian languages are somewhat unlike the Melanesian and
Micronesian ones. They make much less use of prefixes or suffixes
than Austronesian languages usually do.
¯¯ Genetic data provides a possible reason for this. It has traditionally

been supposed that the Polynesian islands were settled from the nearby
Melanesian ones, but actually, genetic data reveals that the first
settlement was directly from Taiwan (via the Philippines). Only later
did migrants from Melanesia add to the mix, and the data suggests
that these migrants were men.
¯¯ Thus, at a certain point, men would have invaded the islands and
learned the local languages imperfectly. This would explain the more
streamlined aspect of languages in Polynesia, which before had no
explanation.
Genetics and Surprises

¯¯ In the Afro-Asiatic family, it has been difficult to establish that one
of the subfamilies, Omotic, actually belongs. The likenesses shown
between Omotic words and those of other Afro-Asiatic subfamilies
are ones also identifiable between the Omotic words and Proto-Indo-
European. The study by Baker, Rotimi, and Shriner has shown that
genetically, Omotic speakers do not group with Afro-Asiatic speakers,
which may be evidence that Omotic is an independent family.
¯¯ There have also been surprises related to Native American languages.

The same study reveals no genetic relationship between speakers of
languages like Navajo (the Na-Dene family) and speakers of Yeniseian
languages in Siberia.
154
¯¯ There were two migrations from Siberia into the Arctic. Today’s Inuit
are descendants of a second one (called the Thule) only about 1,000
years ago. The first migrants (called the Dorset) arrived 4,500 years
ago, kept to themselves rather than interbreeding with other Native
American groups, and went extinct after the second migration, about
700 years ago.
¯¯ The modern Inuit genetically parallel speakers of the Paleosiberian

language family Chukotko-Kamchatkan, suggesting another Native
American-Siberian parallel. However, caution is necessary in
correlating genetic and linguistic data.
¯¯ In some cases, genetic data leads to conclusions flatly untenable with

other facts. A detailed genetic survey of Britain has shown no genetic
imprint from Norse speakers. However, the rich presence of Norse
words in English, along with ample historical and archaeological
documentation of the Norse invasion and presence, would seem to
negate this finding.
SUGGESTED READING
Joseph, “How Genetics Is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate.”

Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived.
155
LECTURE 34
Language Families
and Writing Systems
In many ways, writing systems are quite

dissimilar to the spoken languages being
written. Writing is known indisputably to
have emerged independently in three
places: the Near East, China, and among
Mayans. Those three families of writing do
not parallel spoken language families in
any meaningful way.
156
Lecture 34 Language Families and Writing Systems
Cuneiform Writing
¯¯ Cuneiforms are first attested in about 3500 BCE in what is now Iraq
and Iran. Clay tokens from Susa (dating to 8000 BCE) correspond to
early cuneiform, and therefore are thought to have been the precursor
of the writing system. They were stored in containers with impressions
of the tokens on the lid, and then the impressions came to be seen as
useful symbols.
¯¯ Numbers were the first thing written. The idea of writing about things
and actions came afterward.
¯¯ The Behistun Inscription in Iran describes the military exploits of

King Darius, who ruled Persia from the late 500s BC when it was a
wide-ranging empire. The inscription was meant to communicate
widely and, using cuneiform, renders the text in three languages,
which were Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian Akkadian.
¯¯ However, it is important to realize that there was no cuneiform

language. The system was used to write countless languages from
many families by a great many empires over about 3,000 years. Thus,
to see a cuneiform tablet is to see a writing system rather than a
language.
Hieroglyphics
¯¯ Another writing system began in Egypt around the same time as
cuneiforms emerged eastward. The hieroglyphics were the writing
system not for Arabic, but for the Egyptian Coptic language, a now
extinct member of the Afro-Asiatic family.
¯¯ Symbols could stand for concepts, but as often as not, for metaphorical
extensions of the concepts, such as the pictogram for hand coming to
also stand for power.
157
¯¯ There were also symbols for consonants, sometimes used to reinforce

symbols used for concepts. The symbol for mouth (ro) also stood for
the /r/ sound. For example, in this symbol, there is a branch plus the
symbols for h and t. The word hti̛ meant ‘carve’ or ‘retreat’ in Coptic.
With the knife, the symbol meant ‘carve,’ and with a pair of legs, it
meant ‘retreat.’
Development of Alphabets
¯¯ As natural as it seems now to have symbols corresponding to single
sounds, humans have never intuited this immediately when creating
writing systems from the ground up. Furthermore, the development of
an alphabetic system did not correspond to what the languages being
first written were like.
¯¯ Cuneiforms and hieroglyphics first had symbols corresponding to

syllables. This did make sense for Afro-Asiatic languages, whose words
are based on their consonants staying put while the vowels change
around them. However, this system was also applied to Old Persian
later, which is an Indo-European language.
¯¯ Additionally, Egyptian workers initiated using letters—pictographs

used for their first sound— for the whole writing system. The
hieroglyphic symbol for house, for example, was recruited to stand
for b because the Semitic root for house begins with a b. This is called
Proto-Canaanite writing, and was discovered in a turquoise mine
in the Sinai. However, these workers presumably spoke Afro-Asiatic
languages as well. The alphabet wasn’t a response to anything about
their own language.
¯¯ The Phoenicians, a trading people, took this system over in about 900
BCE. They passed this system to the Greeks, who adopted some signs
to indicate vowels. This probably was due to the fact that vowels are
more important in distinguishing roots in an Indo-European language.
This was the first true alphabet, and it developed into various
alphabets throughout Europe and the Middle East.
158
Other Languages and Systems

¯¯ Aramaic, Mayan, and Chinese writing are other interesting case
studies. Aramaic, a Semitic language, served as a lingua franca from
about 1000 BCE through to a few centuries into the Common Era. It
was used for external communication by the Persians, for example. As
such, its writing system had an impact beyond what one would expect
given the language’s marginal status today.
¯¯ Chinese writing is used for Japanese despite the two languages being
entirely unrelated. It was used to write Korean in the past as well.
¯¯ As for Mayan writing, the Mayan hieroglyphics were used only for
that language in that territory. Some theories suggest that cultural
change diffuses horizontally, on the globe, more easily than vertically
because of geographical and climatological issues. However, there is no
identifiable reason that the Mayans developed writing but the Aztecs
in Mexico and the Incans of South America did not.
The main takeaway is that writing gives very little indication of the
relationship between languages and their families. The essence
of language is how it is spoken, not how world history happens to
have encoded it on paper.
SUGGESTED READING
Coe, Breaking the Maya Code.

Rogers, Writing Systems.
159
QUIZ
LECTURES 31–34
1 What components went into the Media Lengua language? [31]
2 From which three languages are the vast majority of English words
borrowed? [31]
3 Do pronouns change more or less than most other words over

time? [32]
4 In most circumstances, are languages more or less likely to borrow

words for core vocabulary? [32]
160
5 According to research from David Reich’s laboratory, how many

waves of migration are Europeans descended from? [33]
6 Which wave of migration brought the Indo-European family to

Europe? [33]
7 In the cuneiform system, what were the first things to be written? [34]
8 Is cuneiform a language or a writing system? [34]
161
Quiz Answers
QUIZ ANSWERS
LECTURES 1–6
1 Four.
2 New Guinea (which roughly 25 language families call home) has

more than Australia (which has two major families).
3 pǝter.
4 No.
5 Latin.
6 Depending on the language, the use of tones, variations between

dialects, sub-rules, and irregularities all factor in to the difficulty of
this language group.
7 King Darius.
8 Adults are less easily able to pick up new languages than younger
people, so they tend to shave off language complexities.
9 Khoisan.
10 Five.
11 Joseph Greenberg, a linguist and anthropologist.
12 Swahili.
Click here to go back to the quiz.
162
Quiz Answers
LECTURES 7–12
1 Heavier usage of tones.
2 Fula.
3 Bedouins.
4 The use of words that consist of two, three, or four consonants.
5 Approximately 40 million.
6 The Berber subfamily.
7 Roughly 100.
8 The /p/ sound.
9 A shovel. It was found in a bog in Iceland.
10 They assign each unit of meaning to one suffix, making them

agglutinative.
11 That it is possible to posit a protolanguage from which the modern

languages developed via regular sound changes.
12 Morris Swadesh.
163
Quiz Answers
LECTURES 13–18
1 Topography, which allowed different speakers of different languages

to exist separately.
2 The thinner air makes for easier air compression.
3 Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam.
4 With the tongue curled backward.
5 Around Mongolia.
6 Kemal Atatürk.
7 A Chinese system (kanji), a system for grammar (hiragana), and a

system for foreign words (katakana).
8 Hangul.
9 Approximately 1 billion.
10 Tones.
11 China.
12 Many of its prefixes and suffixes have worn off.
164
Quiz Answers
LECTURES 19–24
1 Their wide variety of tones. (Some have up to 12.)
2 Contact with Chinese and other languages already affected by

Chinese.
3 Tagalog.
4 Taiwan.
5 Austronesian.
6 Relative to most other languages, the Oceanic languages have fewer

sounds, so multisyllabic combinations are necessary to have distinct
words in the vocabulary.
7 A language that does not classify as part of a family.
8 Basque.
9 Yes.
10 Papua New Guinea.
11 Roughly two dozen.
12 Having relatively few vowels.
165
Quiz Answers
LECTURES 25–30
1 Damin.
2 They trend toward higher levels of word substitution.
3 Four.
4 Speakers refer to objects as being to the north, south, east, or west of

them, rather than in front of them, behind them, or to their side.
5 Roughly 300.
6 Roughly 350,000.
7 They use unusually long words. (The practice is called polysynthesis.)
8 Greenlandic.
9 Cherokee and Mohawk.
10 The prefixes are more detailed in the Hokan languages.
11 No. (Some groups still haven’t had much contact with outsiders, and
comprehensive fieldwork has only recently begun.)
12 Telephones, radios, and modern media.
166
Quiz Answers
LECTURES 31–34
1 Spanish words used with prefixes, suffixes, and grammar from

Quechua.
2 Norse, French, and Latin.
3 Pronouns change less than most other words over time.
4 In most circumstances, languages are less likely to borrow words for

core vocabulary. (An exception is when one group is psychologically
dominant over another.)
5 Three.
6 The Yamnaya migration. (It came from the Russian steppes.)
7 Numbers.
8 A writing system.
167
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Literature & Language Linguistics

Professor John McWhorter

4840 Westfields Boulevard | Suite 500 | Chantilly, Virginia | 20151‑2299

Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2019

Printed in the United States of America

John McWhorter, PhD

Dr. McWhorter is the author of numerous books, including The Power of

In addition to his work in linguistics, Dr. McWhorter is the author of

2 The First Family Discovered: Indo-European. . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 Indo-European Languages in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

4 Indo-European Languages in Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

6 Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

QUIZ FOR LECTURES 1–6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

7 Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

8 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond I . . . . . . . . . . . 34

9 Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond II. . . . . . . . . . . 38

10 Nilo-Saharan: Africa’s Hardest Languages?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

11 Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe?. . . . . . . . . . . . 45

12 How to Identify a Language Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

QUIZ FOR LECTURES 7–12. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

13 What Is a Caucasian Language?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

14 Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European. . . . . . . . . . . . 59

15 Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

16 Japanese and Korean: Alike yet Unrelated. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

17 The Languages We Call Chinese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

18 Chinese’s Family Circle: Sino-Tibetan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

QUIZ FOR LECTURES 13–18. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

19 Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

20 Languages of the South Seas I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

21 Languages of the South Seas II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

22 Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

23 Creole Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

24 Why Are There So Many Languages in New Guinea?. . . . . . . 108

QUIZ FOR LECTURES 19–24. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

25 The Languages of Australia I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

26 The Languages of Australia II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

27 The Original American Languages I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

28 The Original American Languages II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

29 The Original American Languages III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

30 The Original American Languages IV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

QUIZ FOR LECTURES 25–30. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

31 Languages Caught between Families. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

32 How Far Back Can We Trace Languages?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

33 What Do Genes Say about Language Families?. . . . . . . . . . . 150

34 Language Families and Writing Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

QUIZ FOR LECTURES 31–34. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

To go back to the page you came from, PRESS Alt + ← on a PC or

¯¯ Slashes are used to indicate sounds (e.g., /b/).

Language Families of the World

Aside from looking at features of the languages themselves, the course

1 The structures used by European languages are but one of many

2 European languages are in no way more sophisticated or modern

3 Language is always changing, and the distribution of today’s families

4 That kind of change continues today, as ever more minority

Why Are There

There are 7,000 languages in the world,

Theories on the Spread of Language

¯¯ However, remains of Homo sapiens now date back as far as 300,000

THE PETROGLYPHS OF WADI RUM

The Morphing of Sounds

The Morphing of Materials and Meaning

The Language Family Tree