Survey of European Languages - Introduction

Languages under threat

Excluding dialects, it is estimated that 6500 languages are spoken in the world today. Many of them are threatened and will not survive. Some are spoken by only a handful of people. On average, one language dies every day. By the end of the 21st century it is thought that no more than 100 languages will still be spoken.

There is one language in Brazil where there is only one speaker. In 2003 the two remaining people that spoke it died. Today the language is spoken only by a parrot. In Australia, one aboriginal language is spoken by only two people. They are brother and sister. Strict tribal taboos have forbidden them, since puberty, to speak to each other, or even see each other. Researchers are busy recording the language before it becomes extinct.

The development of language

The first evidence we have of a language being written down is Sumerian in about 3100 BC. It is estimated that, at the time, there were about seven million people living in the word. Today there are over six thousand million. In Europe there are over 400 million speaking more than 50 indigenous languages.

Everyone alive today is related to one of two common ancestors - who lived comparatively recently. Every female is directly descended, mother-to daughter, from a woman who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. Every male is directly descended, father to son, from a man who lived in Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Of course other men and women were alive at the time, but at some stage their mother-to-daughter line ended because there were no daughters and their father-to-son line ended because there were no sons.

All this has been discovered only in the past few years through the study of human DNA - a branch of the science of genetics. We all have a small part of our DNA that is exclusively inherited from our mothers. It is called Mitochondrial DNA. Hence the common female ancestor has been given the name "Mitochondrial Eve". Sons inherit it but do not pass it on.

Sons inherit a Y-chromosome from their father and pass it on to their sons. Hence the name "Y-Chromosome Adam" given to the original male ancestor. Daughters do not have this Y-Chromosome.

Europe

20,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice-age, much of Europe was under a huge sheet of ice, over a kilometre thick. Frozen tundra stretched down to the Mediterranian. So much water from the oceans was locked up in the ice-sheet that sea levels had dropped by 100 metres.

As a result the coast-lines were pushed further out. The British Isles were no longer cut off from the continent. This remained till about 8500 years ago when the melting ice-sheet raised the sea-level again and the land bridge was flooded.

As the ice melted, the edge of the ice-sheet moved further and further north allowing animals, and the hunter-gatherers that depended on them for food, to move north with them.

Speech

In our literate society we find it hard to imagine how people could live and communities could survive and prosper by speech alone, without any form of writing. In evolutionary terms writing is a new phenomenon.

For tens of thousands of years people have been able to communicate - but by speech alone. There are still large numbers of people in the world who are illiterate, and yet they are able to lead very full lives. Ancient tribes were able to keep their folk-memory alive, their "literature", by word of mouth. Knowledge was passed from parent to child, and bards learnt by heart, and recited, long epic poems.