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
2500 years ago, about the time of the battle of
Salamis, when the Greeks annihilated nearly half of Xerxes' Persian fleet, it
is estimated that there were about three 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
Literate people find it hard to imagine how people
could live and societies 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.
Language families
Most European languages are descended from an early
common tongue, and are therefore related. Many other languages, spoken in
India, Iran, Iraq, parts of Russia and elsewhere speak languages that are also
members of this group. Hence the family
name "Indo-European".
The only European languages that are not in this
family are Basque, (spoken in NE Spain and SW France), the so-called
Finno-Ugrian languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Saami - the language of
the Lapps), Turkish and Maltese (the only Arabic language to be written in
Latin characters).
Of course many other languages are spoken in Europe
today, but they are not indigenous European languages They are new-comers from further afield, and include Chinese,
Japanese and Arabic - and very many more.
Most schools in London are multi-ethnic, some with
more than 100 different languages spoken. One school claims to list 300 mother
tongues among its pupils.
The origin of the Indo-European languages
A number of theories have been advanced about the
origin of the Indo-European languages. Much effort has been expended in trying
to identify where the original language was spoken, and how it spread. One theory suggests that it was spoken
somewhere on the Russian Steppes about 4000 years ago by the Kurgans, and that
it spread, perhaps through invasion - by warriors riding horses.
A more recent, and seemingly more plausible, theory is
that it spread slowly and gradually along with agriculture from its home about
10,000 years ago in Eastern Anatolia in present-day Turkey. As the new way of life spread, (planting
seeds and remaining in situ to harvest the result, and domesticating primitive
sheep, goats, cows, pigs and chickens) so the language of these early farmers
spread with them. Each generation would
move outwards at a rate of 25 to 30 km each generation. As sons moved on to
find new land, they would occupy areas previously used by the indigenous
hunter-gatherers.
With this theory there is no need to postulate an
invasion,. Hunter-gatherers may have
been displaced, but it is likely that they too began to adopt the way of life
of the farmers. Some already lived in settlements and had domesticated animals.
It took about 4000 years for agriculture to reach the
western and northern limits of the continent.
According to this theory, as agriculture spread, so
the language spread, gradually absorbing, and being influenced by, the
different languages spoken by the hunter-gatherers. Over the centuries the variants of this language would become
more and more differentiated and would crystallize into forms of speech that
became mutually unintelligible.
Language groups
The Indo-European family includes a large number of
languages, some very important, some with few speakers today and some that have
become extinct.
The family divides up into:
Germanic
North Germanic: Norwegian
Swedish Danish & Icelandic
West Germanic: English
Central Germanic: Dutch Flemish and Afrikaans
Italic (Romance)
French Spanish Italian Portuguese Catalan Galician
Romanian Sardinian Occitan/Provençal and Romansch/Ladin.
Celtic
Irish Gaelic Scots Gaelic Manx Gaelic (Isle of Man)
Welsh Breton Cornish
Slavic
Russian Ukrainian Belorussian Bulgarian Serbian
Croatian Slovenian Slovak Czech Polish and Sorbian/Wendish
Balto-Slavic
Lithuanian Latvian Old Prussian
Some Indo-European languages died out a long time ago,
like Sanscrit and Hittite. Others have
become extinct more recently. Dalmatian, an Italic language used on the
Adriatic coast (roughly where Croatia lies), was spoken well into the19th
century. The last speaker died in 1898. Cornish was spoken till the late 18th
century. The last native Manx-speaker, on the Isle of Man, died as late as the
1940s. Cornish and Manx are now being revived by enthusiasts. Latin was spoken
into the 17th century and is used in some Catholic churches even today. Ancient
Greek continues to be taught in many schools, while Sanscrit is still studied
in some universities.
Outside Europe
Members of the Indo-European family spoken mostly
outside Europe include Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Kurdic and Armenian.
Writing
While people remained illiterate, they got no further
than scratching signs and simple pictures onto stones and clay. Writing proper developed independently in
China, Egypt and the Indus Valley in India.
It began as picture-writing. In
time the pictures became stylized and some signs began to be used in
combination to represent ideas, or other objects.
Chinese has crystallized at this stage. The Japanese
Kanji script is in a similar position, having developed from the Chinese system
of writing, although for a totally unrelated language.
Our alphabet owes its origin, ultimately, to Egyptian
hieroglyphics, (meaning "priestly writing") the system of pictures
used on their monuments and sacred buildings. A simplified form of this, called
hieratic, was used by the armies of scribes needed by the bureaucracy to
administer the country. It was written
in ink on papyrus, a form of paper made from the papyrus reed.
In hieroglyphics, and hieratic, 25 of the simpler
signs were also used alongside other picture-signs to indicate a sound (always
a consonant) or to convey a different meaning.
A break-through
Around 2000 BC something simple but with profound
significance occurred in Egypt that, after many centuries, triggered the spread
of writing around the world. A few
quick-witted foreign workers, perhaps employed in mining or in the army, who
spoke a semitic language totally unrelated to Egyptian, had learnt some
Egyptian and could understand some of the hieroglyphs and hieratic script.
It occurred to them that the signs which Egyptians
used to help determine the meaning of a picture and which represented a
consonantal sound, could also be used to write sounds in their own semitic
language - just as West Europeans learning Greek or Russian today, find that
they can write their own name using the Greek or Cyrillic alphabet.
The idea was very simple, but ground-breaking: to use
a sign to represent just one single sound, totally unrelated to the
meaning. By writing several signs
together they could "spell" a word, any word, in their own
language.
At first the signs used were copied from the Egyptian
ones, but over time they gradually changed, becoming less and less like the
Egyptian originals.
The Phoenicians
By 1000 BC this system of sound-signs had become
crystallized and was being used to write Phoenician, the semitic language used
by people living in what is now the Lebanon.
Phoenician was descended from a semitic language similar to the one
spoken by those early people who had had the original bright idea. Phoenician is the oldest alphabetic language
that we know of.
Many of the letters in our present-day alphabet reveal
not only their Phoenician parentage, but even their Egyptian origin. A (now inverted) has the horns of an ox. K
has the spread fingers of the hand and the o is the Egyptian eye. P is the
human face and neck, in profile.
The shape of M has developed from the squiggly line
that denoted waves and meant water. The
Phoenicians called the letter "mem".
In the Phoenician alphabet each letter, being in the
shape of a common object, had the name (in Phoenician) of that object. And the
initial sound of its name was the sound that the letter represented. Their
letter K was called "kaph" meaning "hand" and had the shape
of a hand with its fingers spread.
Their "A" was called "Alef" meaning "ox"
and had the shape of an ox's head with horns.
The Phoenicians were a great sea power. They set up trading
stations all round the Mediterranean coast, even venturing out into the
Atlantic founding what was to become Cadiz in SW Spain. Carthage in present-day
Tunisia was founded by them as early as 800 BC. It was eventually to become more important than Phoenicia, only
to be destroyed in 146 BC by the Romans during the Punic wars.
Wherever the Phoenicians went they took their language
with them. Their illiterate trading partners must have been intrigued to learn
about the system of writing that they used. Some of them copied it and used the
letters to write their own language.
The Greeks
Around 800 BC the Greeks, who had no method of writing
their own language, borrowed the Phoenician script and adapted it for their own
use. They changed some of the shapes and allotted different sounds to them. In
doing so they added 5 extra signs to represent the vowel sounds, since
Phoenician did not indicate vowels.
Hebrew and Arabic, which are related semitic
languages, do not use vowels in their traditional writing. Most words start and
end with a consonant. Longer words have
a consonant in the middle, so it is relatively easy to read without the need
for the intervening vowels to be indicated.
So a second transfer was taking place. It had gone from Egyptian to an early
Semitic language (which developed into Phoenician) and now it was going from
Phoenician to Greek.
The Greeks also became a great sea-power and they too
founded colonies and trading posts over much of the Eastern Mediterranean. They
too took their writing system with them, modified now to suit their own
language.
Etruscans
The Greek colonies in Italy came into contact with the
Etruscans, a people living in the area of Tuscany. The Etruscans.in turn
borrowed the Greek alphabet and used it to write their own Etruscan language -
that was totally unrelated to Greek. In doing so they again adapted some of the
letters to suit their sounds.
As an interesting side-line, when the Romans arrived
in Gaul they found that some members of the local tribes were already literate
and were using Greek to write their Gallic language. They had borrowed it from
the Greeks who had founded Marseilles.
The Romans
In the 400s BC another transfer took place, and a most
significant one. The people of Latium,
who spoke Latin, and occupied the area south of Tuscany, borrowed the Etruscan
alphabet and started using it to write Latin.
And from there it spread throughout the Roman world. And from its use for Latin comes its use for
all the languages of Western Europe.
Just as the proto-Indo-European language changed over time, as it spread outwards, and groups became isolated from each other, so Latin changed in the different regions of Europe as the speakers became separated from each other and their speech was influenced by the languages spoken by the local inhabitants. The various Romance languages developed from the vulgar Latin of the soldiers, merchants and farmers.
Cyrillic
The Slav world uses a different alphabet. In the late 8th century two Greek monks,
later to become St Cyril and St Methodius, travelled north into present-day
Bulgaria to convert to Christianity the illiterate, Slav-speaking peoples. In order to write the Slavic languages they
adapted the Greek alphabet to handle the different sounds. The alphabet that
resulted became known as Cyrillic. It
is used today to write Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Belorussian, Macedonian
and Serbian.
The Serbs and the Croats speak the same language
(Serbo-Croat), but the Croats (mostly Catholic) use the Latin alphabet while
the Serbs (mostly Orthodox) use Cyrillic.
Since the break-up of Yugoslavia the Croats have been making an effort
to differentiate their language from Serbian, mainly by reviving old words.
In Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, street-signs nowadays
are written in both Cyrillic and Latin characters. Street-signs in the bigger cities in Greece also have the street
signs in two alphabets - written in Greek and Latin characters.
Syllaberies
A few languages have arrived at a half-way stage
between pictograms and ideograms (typified by Egyptian hieroglyphics and
Chinese) and an alphabet proper. It is called a syllabery. In a syllabery each sign represents not a
single sound, nor a complete concept, but a syllable, consisting of a consonant
followed by a vowel.
The Japanese Katakana is one such syllabery. It is used for writing foreign names.
Another is the Japanese Hiragana.
Cuneiform, the ancient writing system used in Mesopotamia and
surrounding areas for over 3000 years, is another syllabery. It was used for writing many unrelated
languages including Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Hittite. It
consisted of wedge-shaped indentations in clay or cut into stone. Sumerian is the oldest known language in
written form, with inscriptions dating from 3100 BC.
Estimating the number of speakers
It is relatively simple to determine the number of
people that live in a particular country.
But it is extremely difficult to calculate the number of speakers of
particular languages. Nearly all the
world's major languages are spoken in more than one country. And many people
speak more than one language, either fluently or well enough to use it much of
the time.
The number of speakers revealed in a survey depends on
the question asked, such as: What is
your mother tongue? What language do
you speak most of the time? What is
your best language? What language do you speak at work? What language do you speak at home? Many people will give a different answer,
depending on which question is asked. In many cases the respondent is unsure
which is the correct answer for them.
Large numbers of people live "abroad", or in
a country other than the one where they were born. And many spend much of their
lives speaking a language that is not their mother tongue. A lot of people are bilingual, or
trilingual, switching easily from one language to another.
The numbers of speakers given In this survey are
therefore estimates. Where the
estimates vary widely (often depending on the question asked in different types
of research) two numbers are given: the highest and the lowest figures recorded
e.g.
French 60 -70 m, Spanish 150-250m
Where a language is spoken widely as a second
language, the total number of speakers (as a first and a second language
combined) is added in brackets. e.g.
English 300 - 350 m (700-1400 m)
The figures are given in millions, shown by the letter
m. Where the numbers are less than a
million, the figures represent thousands, and are shown by the letter k. e.g.
Icelandic 230-250 k.
Survey4.DOC 4
July 2004