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stephanedugast · 1 year
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[JOUR J]  Jean Malaurie, le dernier roi du Pôle
Spécialiste du monde arctique, l’explorateur Jean Malaurie fête aujourd’hui jeudi 22 décembre 2022 ses 100 ans. L’homme qui parle aux pierres a vécu mille vies en une. Tout un siècle d’observations et de réflexion est résumé selon le quotidien Paris-Normandie dans son dernier ouvrage : « De la pierre à l’âme ».
 QUI EST-IL ?
Jean Malaurie Né le 22 décembre 1922
Explorateur spécialiste des régions arctiques et anthropo-géographe (comme il aime à se définir), Jean Malaurie a d'abord étudié la géomorphologie avant de se joindre en 1948 au Groenland à une expédition conduite par Paul-Émile Victor. Le Grand Nord et ses habitants vont dès lors devenir son domaine d'étude.
Directeur de recherche émérite au CNRS, Jean Malaurie va ensuite diriger le Centre d'Études Arctiques à l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. La première chaire de géographie polaire est créée pour lui en 1957 par le grand historien Fernand Braudel. Parallèlement, il fonde et dirige la célèbre collection Terre Humaine chez Plon éditions.
Scientifique engagé et écrivain de renom, Jean Malaurie va publier de nombreux ouvrages, dont des best-sellers comme Les Derniers rois de Thulé (1955), traduit en 23 langues, Ultima Thulé (1990), L'Appel du Nord (2001) ou encore  Hummocks (2003-2005), tous consacrés (comme ses 9 films) au Groenland et à ses eskimos. Président d’honneur à vie de l'Académie Polaire à Saint-Pétersbourg, docteur Honoris Causa de l'Université d'État de Saint-Pétersbourg Ambassadeur de Bonne Volonté pour les régions polaires arctiques à l’Unesco, Jean Malaurie accumule les prix et les distinctions en France comme à l’étranger.
 CITATION
«Voyageant seul, j'ai vécu plusieurs mois avec les Inuit - et comme les Inuit. On allait à la chasse, à la pêche ensemble. On partageait la soupe au sang. Peu à peu, ils ont cessé de se méfier et m'ont adopté. Ils pressentaient que leur société ancestrale était menacée et ont compris que je pourrais devenir en quelque sorte leur secrétaire, leur témoin irréfutable, leur avocat. Le plus dur fut de les amener à s'intéresser à eux-mêmes »
Jean Malaurie, L’Art du grand Nord, 2001
  REVUE DE PRESSE
TÉLÉRAMA
Jean Malaurie a 100 ans… toute une vie d’aventures à explorer dans ses Mémoires
https://www.telerama.fr/livre/jean-malaurie-a-100-ans-toute-une-vie-d-aventures-a-explorer-dans-ses-memoires-7013576.php
  L’explorateur Jean Malaurie : “Je ne considère pas la fin du monde comme une certitude absolue”
https://www.telerama.fr/idees/lexplorateur-jean-malaurie-je-ne-considere-pas-la-fin-du-monde-comme-une-certitude-absolue-6671495.php
LE JDD
Jean Malaurie, l’anthropogéographe qui a osé résister
https://www.lejdd.fr/Culture/jean-malaurie-lanthropogeographe-qui-a-ose-resister-4146191
  LA VIE
Jean Malaurie : “Il faut aimer l’autre pour commencer à le comprendre”
https://www.lavie.fr/idees/debats/jean-malaurie-il-faut-aimer-lautre-pour-commencer-a-le-comprendre-6523.php
 LA CROIX
Jean Malaurie, voyageur du monde
https://www.la-croix.com/France/Jean-Malaurie-voyageur-monde-2019-06-09-1201027742
 SON
Jean Malaurie a 100 ans. Écoutez-le parler de l'Arctique 💙
https://youtu.be/Ld0y8jINVbE
  PODCAST
 FRANCE CULTURE
Les nuits polaires peintes par Jean Malaurie
Diffusion sur France Culture le mercredi 23 novembre 2022
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/affaire-en-cours/les-nuits-polaires-peintes-par-jean-malaurie-9772155
   « Ces pays où l'on n'arrive jamais »
Épisode 2/4 : Ultima Thulé
Diffusion sur France Culture Jeudi 18 août 2022
Le deuxième volet de la série de quatre émissions sur les “Pays où l’on n’arrive jamais” porte sur Thulé, non loin du pôle Nord. C’est par la voix si envoûtante de Jean Malaurie que l’on cheminera jusqu’à cette destination à la fois mythologique et pourtant bien réelle.
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-nuits-de-france-culture/ultima-thule-6857093
  RFI
Jean Malaurie, une vie parmi les Inuits
Émission “Si loin, si proche » diffusée le 9/08/2019
https://www.rfi.fr/fr/emission/20190811-jean-malaurie-ethnogeologue-francais-vie-inuits
  BD
Malaurie, l'appel de Thulé
https://www.editions-delcourt.fr/bd/series/serie-malaurie-l-appel-de-thule/album-malaurie-l-appel-de-thule
Héros contemporain, scientifique et aventurier, Jean Malaurie étudie l'Arctique et sa population depuis plus de 70 ans. Découvrez l'intensité de cette expérience humaine hors du commun et l'urgence de son enseignement...  Fin des années 40, la géomorphologie entraîne Jean Malaurie du désert saharien aux terres arctiques. De sarencontre avec les Inuit naît un profond respect pour leur culture et leur approche de la spiritualité. Avec cette biographie dessinée, Makyo, Frédéric Bihel et lui-même, expriment avec force son plaidoyer pour la sauvegarde d'un peuple dont la disparition pourrait préfigurer la nôtre...
Scénaristes :  Makyo, Jean Malaurie Illustrateur : Frédéric Bihel Coloriste : Frédéric Bihel
 AVIS
 « Jean Malaurie, ce géant !
C’est une immense figure mondiale de la science et de l’exploration qui fête aujourd’hui ses cent ans. Né le 22 décembre 1922 et en pleine forme ! Le froid extrême, la glace et l’activité intellectuelle conservent et font les grands hommes…Bon anniversaire, cher Jean Malaurie !
Vous qui, le premier, par vos nombreuses expéditions polaires au Groenland, avez compris et traduit l’esprit Inuit, le peuple le plus septentrional de la Terre ! Vous qui, dans la filiation de Jean-Baptiste Charcot et Paul-Emile Victor avez attiré l’attention internationale dès les années 50 sur les mondes arctiques et leur extrême fragilité ! Vous qui avez créé la mythique collection « Terre Humaine » aux éditions Plon, en y publiant vos « Derniers rois de Thulé » ou « Tristes Tropiques » de Claude Lévi-Strauss ! Chapeau bas, Monsieur Malaurie! »
Olivier Poivre d’Arvor
  ARCHIVES
Jean Malaurie : Ultima Thulé
23 janvier 1993 Olivier BARROT présente le livre de Jean MALAURIE, "Ultima Thulé", histoire personnelle de la conquête du pôle Nord. Images d'archive INA Institut National de l'Audiovisuel
https://youtu.be/JXe57rTTIsA
 BIBLIOGRAPHIE
L’Allée des Baleines (Mille et Une Nuits, 2003, 1ère     édition ; 2ème édition revue et augmentée, 2008.
Terre Humaine : Une anthologie (Pocket, 2005 - avec Pierre Chalmin)
Du Nouveau-Québec au Nunavik :     1964-2004, une fragile autonomie     (Economica, 2005)
Les Archipels d’une pensée (Apogée, 2004)
Anthropogéographie (Economica, 2002)
Ultima Thulé (Le Chêne, 2001)
L’Art du Grand Nord (Citadelle & Mazenod, 2001)
Fécamp, 1900-2000 : un siècle de     vie (Editions     Franciscaines, 2000)
Hummocks - Relief de mémoire (tome     2) : Arctique Central canadien (Omnibus, 1998)
Hummocks - Relief de mémoire (tome     1) : Nord Groëland     (Omnibus, 1998)
Aventure arctique : ma vie dans     les glaces du Nord     (Cths - Comité des Travaux, 1998)
Les Derniers Rois de Thulé (Omnibus, 1996)
Le peuple esquimau aujourd’hui et     demain (Editions de     l’EHESS, 1973)
 Photo une : Jean Malaurie au Groenland en 1951 © Terre humaine/Plon
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love that there's a "guy who tried to smuggle Bibles into the Soviet Union and got elected to Congress". i'd probably disagree with him on nearly every policy position but i respect that act.
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mapsontheweb · 1 month
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The triple division of the Slavic languages
by anthro.atlas
The Slavic languages, one of the major subfamilies of the Indo-European languages, are usually divided into three branches: East (e.g., Russian and Belarussian), South (e.g., Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian), and West (e.g., Polish and Slovak). Some scholars contend, however, that this division is mostly based on extralinguistic factors, such as the speakers’ divergent ideological and religious views. For instance, some argue that some languages and dialects are misclassified due to political factors (e.g., Rusyn and Silesian) and that there are only two main branches, the South and the North (which includes the East and West Slavic languages). Sources: Ethnologue (2023) & Tomasz Kamusella’s paper, “The Triple Division of the Slavic Languages” (2005)
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What's the average language like?
This will be a giant of a post, because this is a subject that I really like. So much of what we think about language just isn't true when you look at the majority of them and I'm not even going into how the languages themselves are constructed, only the people speaking them, if that makes sense. It will make sense in a moment, I promise
First, let's discuss assumptions. When you think of the abstract idea of a language, what do you imagine?
How many speakers?
Where is it spoken geographically?
Do speakers of the language only speak that language or do they speak at least one other language? How many more languages?
Is the language tied to a state/country?
Is the language thriving or endangered?
In what domains is the language used? (home, school, higher education, administration and politics, in the workplace, in popular media...)
Is the language well documented and supported? Are there resources like dictionaries to look up words in, does google translate work for it, does Word/google docs work etc?
Is the language spoken or signed?
Is the language written down? Is it written down in a standardised way?
Do you see where I'm going with this? My perspective on what a language is has completely shifted after studying some linguistics, and this only covers language usage and spread, not how words and grammar work in different languages. Anyways, let's talk facts. (if no other sources are given the source is my uni lectures)
How many speakers does the average language have?
The median language has 7 600 native speakers.
7 600 people is the median number of speakers. Half the world's languages have more, half have less.
Most languages in this tournament have millions of speakers. But maybe that's relatively common? After all, half of the world's languages have more than 7 600 speakers. No.
94% of all languages have less than a million speakers.
Just so you know, big languages are far from the norm. There are 6700-6800 living languages in the world (according to ethnologue and glottolog, the two big language databases. I've taken the numbers for languages having a non-zero number of speakers and not being classed as extinct respectively. Both list more languages).
6% of 6700-6800 languages would be around 400 languages with more than a million speakers. Still a lot, but only a (loud) minority. It's enough to skew the average number of speakers per language upwards though. Counting 8 billion people and 6800 languages, that's almost 1.2 million people per language on average. The minority is Very loud.
Where are most languages spoken?
First of all, I'll present you with these graphs (data stolen from my professor's powerpoint) which I first showed in this post:
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49% of all languages are spoken in Africa and Oceania, a disproportionately large amount compared to their population. On the other hand, Europe and Asia have disproportionally few languages, though Asia still has the largest amount of languages. Curious, considering Europe is often thought of as a place with many languages.
Sub-Saharan Africa is a very linguistically interesting place, but we need to talk about New Guinea. One island with 6.4 million people. Somehow over 800 languages. If you count the surrounding islands that's 7.1 million people and 1050 languages. Keep in mind that there are 6700-6800 languages in the world, so those 1050 make up more than a seventh of all languages. The average New Guinean language has less than 3000 speakers. Some are larger, but still less than 250 000 speakers. Remember, this is a seventh of all languages. It's a lot more common than the millions of speakers situation!
So yeah, many languages both in and outside New Guinea are spoken by few people in one or a few villages. Which is to say a small territory. But 7600 speakers spread over a big territory will have a hard time keeping their contact and language alive, so it's not surprising.
Moving on, lets talk about...
Bilingualism! Or multilingualism!
Is it common to speak two or more languages? Yes, it is. This is the situation in most of the world and has been the case historically. Fun fact: monolingual areas are uncommon historically and states which have become monolingual became so relatively recently.
One common thing is to learn a lingua franca in addition to your native language, a language that most people in the area know at least some of so you can use it to communicate with people speaking other languages than you.
As an example, I'm writing this in English which isn't my native language and some of you reading this won't have English as your native language either. Other examples are Swahili in large parts of eastern Africa and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (the autonomous state, not the entire island).
Speakers of minority languages often have to learn the majority language in the country too. It's difficult to live somewhere where most daily life takes place in one language without speaking at least some of it. This is the case for native people in colonised countries, immigrants and smaller ethnic groups just to mention a few situations. All countries don't have majority languages, but some are larger, more influential and used for things like administration, business and higher education. It's common for schooling to transition from local languages to a larger language or lingua franca in countries with many languages.
Another approach than the lingua franca is learning the language of villages or towns surrounding you, which is very common in New Guinea and certainly other parts of the world too. It's not unusual to know multiple languages, in some places in sub-saharan Africa people speak five or six languages on a village level. Monolingualism is a weird outlier.
Speaking of monolingualism, let's move on to...
Languages and countries
This is a big talking point, mostly because it affected my view of language before I started thinking about it. First of all, I'm going to talk about the nation state and how it impacts languages within it and the way people view language (mostly because it's a source of misconceptions which fall apart as soon as you start to think about them, but if you don't the misconceptions will stay). Then I'll move on to countries with lots of languages and what happens there instead.
So, the nation state
The idea is that the people of a nation state share a common culture, history, values and other such things, the most important here being language. We can all agree that this type of nationalism has done lots of harm to various minorities and migrants all over the world, but it's still an idea that has had and still has a big impact on especially the western world. The section on nation states will focus on the West, because that's the area I know enough about to feel comfortable writing about in this regard.
How do you see this in common conceptions of language? It's in statements and thoughts like this: In France people speak French (but what about Breton? Basque? Corsican? Various Arabics? Some of the other 15 indigenous and 18 non-indigenous languages established in France? What about people speaking French outside of France?), in the US people speak English (but what about the 197 living indigenous languages? Or the 34 established non-indigenous languages? And the many extinct indigenous languages forcibly killed by the promotion of English?).
In X country people speak X, except for the people who don't, but let's ignore them and pretend everyone speaks X. Which most might actually do if it's the single national language that's used everywhere, it's common to learn a second language after all.
This is of course a simplified (and eurocentric) picture, as many countries either have multiple national languages or recognise at least some minority languages and give them legal protection and rights to access certain services in their languages (like government agency information). Bi-/multilingual signage is common and getting more common, either on a regional or a national level. Maybe because we're finally getting ready to move on from one language, one people, one state and give indigenous languages the minimum of availability they need to survive.
I wrote a long section about how nation states affect language, but I realised that veered way off topic and should be its own post. The short version is that a language might become more standardised simply by being tied to a country and more mobility among the population leading to less prominent dialects. There's also been (and still is) lots of opression and attempts to wipe out minority (often indigenous) languages in the name of national unity. Lots of atrocities have been comitted. Sometimes the same processes of language loss happen without force, just by economic pressure and misconceptions about bilingualism.
What does this have to do with the average language?
I simply want to challenge two assumptions:
That all languages are these big national languages tied to a country
That it's common that only one language is spoken within a country. If you look closer there will be smaller languages, often indigenous and often endangered. There are also countries in the West where multiple languages hold equal or similar status (just look at Switzerland and its four official languages)
Starting with the second point, let's take a look at how Europe is weird about language again
Majority languges aren't universal
I'm going to present you with a list of the 10 countries with the most living languages, not counting immigrant languages (list taken from wikipedia, which has Ethnologue as the source):
Papua New Guinea, 840 languages
Indonesia, 707 languages
Nigeria, 517 languages
India, 447 languages
China, 302 languages
Mexico, 287 languages
Cameroon, 274 languages
Australia, 226 languages
United states, 219 languages
Brazil, 217 languages
DR Congo, 212 languages
Philippines, 183 languages
Malaysia, 133 languages
Chad, 130 languages
Tanzania, 125 languages
This further challenges the idea of one country one language. Usually there's a lingua franca, but it's not always a native language and it's not always the case that most are monolingual in it (like the US or Australia, both of which have non-indigenous languages as widespread lingua francas). Europe is the outlier here. People might use multiple languages in their day to day lives, which are spoken by a varying number of people.
In some cases the indigenous or smaller local languages are extremely disadvantaged compared to one official language (think the US, Australia and China), while in other places like Nigeria, several larger languages are widely used in their respective areas alongside local languages, with English as the official language even though it's spoken by few people.
It's actually pretty common in decolonised countries to use the colonial language as an official language to avoid favoring one ethnic group and their language over others. Others simply don't have an official language, while South Africa's strategy is having 12 official languages (there are 20 living indigenous languages and 11 non-indigenous languages in total, and one of the official ones is English, so not all languages are official with this strategy either). Indonesia handled decolonisation by picking a smaller language (a dialect of Malay spoken by around 10% at the time, avoiding favouring the Javanese aka the dominating ethnic group by picking their language), modifying it, and started using it as the new national language Indonesian. It's doing very well, but at the cost of many smaller languages.
Going back to the list, it's also interesting to compare the mean speaker number (if every language in a country was spoken by the same amount of people) and the median speaker number (half have more speakers, half have less). The median is always lower than the mean, often by a lot. This means that the languages in a country don't have similar speaker numbers, so one or a few languages with lots of speakers drive the average upwards while the majority of languages are small. Just like for the entire world.
The US and Australia stand out with 12 and 10 median speakers, respectively. About 110 languages in the US have 12 or fewer native speakers. The corresponding number for Australia is 113 languages with 10 or fewer speakers. There are some stable languages with few speakers documented, but they have/had between 40 and 60 speakers, so those numbers point towards a lot of indigenous languages dying very soon unless revitalisation efforts succeed quickly. This brings us to the topic of...
Endangered languages
This is an interesting tool called glottoscope made by Glottolog which you can play around with and view data on endangered languages and description status (which is the next heading).
I'll pull out some numbers for you:
Remember those 6700 languages in Glottolog? That's living languages. How many extinct languages are listed?
936 extinct languages. That's ~12,5% of the languages we know of. (Glottolog doesn't include reconstructed languages like Proto-Indo-European, only languages where we either have enough remaining texts to conclude it was a separate language or reliable account(s) that conclude the same. We can only assume that there are thousands of undocumented languages hiding in history that we'll never know of)
How many more are on the way to become extinct?
Well, only 36% (2800 languages) aren't threatened, which means that the other 64% are either extinct or facing different levels of threat
What makes a language threatened? The short answer is people not speaking the language, especially when it's not passed down to younger generations. The long answer of why that happens comes later.
306 languages are listed as nearly extinct and 412 more as moribound. That means that only the grandparent generation and older speak it and the chain of transmission to younger generations has broken. These two categories include 9,26% of all known languages.
The rest of all languages either fall into the threatened or shifting category. The threatened category means that the language is used by all generations but is losing speakers. The shifting category refers to languages where the parental generation speaks the language but their children don't. In both of these cases it's easier to revive the language, since parents can speak to the children at home instead of having to rely on external structures (for example classes in the heritage language taught like foreign language classes in schools).
Where are languages threatened?
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This map is also from glottoscope and can be found here. I recommend playing around with it, you can zoom in and hover over every dot to see which language it represents. The colours signify threat level: green for not threatened, light green for threatened, orange for shifting, red for moribound and nearly extinct, and black for extinct. I'll come back to the shapes later.
As you can see, language death is more common in certain areas, like Australia, Siberia, North America and the Amazon, but it's still spread over the entire world.
Why are languages going extinct?
There are two important dimensions to the vigorousness of a language: The first is the number of speakers who claim the language as their own and speak it with each other. No speakers means no language. If all speakers move to different places or assimilate by shifting to a dominant language in the area (sometimes for work opportunities or for their childrens' future work opportunities. Sometimes because of which language(s) schools are taught in or disinterest from the children in the language and culture. Sometimes migration of an ethnic group for various reasons leads to language shifts. There are many complex reasons to why the link of transmission can break)
The other dimension, which ties into the first one, is the number of situations in which a language is used. There are many domains a language can be used in, like at home, in school, in the workplace, in politics and administration, in higher education, for international communication, in religious activities, in popular media like movies and music etc. When a language is no longer or never used in a particular domain, it might lose the associated vocabulary. When it becomes confined to a singular domain like the home, the usage goes down. The home is usually the last place an endangered language is spoken.
Usage in a domain is a reason to speak or hear the language. It's a reason to keep it alive. People also forget or get worse at languages they don't use. That's why a common revitalisation tactic is producing movies, radio programmes, news reporting, books and other media in a dying language. It gives people both reason and opportunity to use their language skills. Which language is used in schools is also important, as it keeps basic vocabulary for sciences and explaining the world alive. Another revitalisation tactic is making up new words to talk about modern concepts, some examples are the Kaqchikel word rub'eyna'oj from this tournament or creating advanced math vocabulary in Māori.
What does endangered languages have to do with the average language?
Trying to get this post back on track, these are some key points:
64% of all documented languages are either extinct or facing some level of threat. That's the majority of all language
Even excluding the extinct languages, the majority of languages are threatened or worse
This means that the average language is facing a loss of speakers, some more disastrous than others. Being a minority language in an increasingly globalized world is dangerous
Describing a language
Are you able to look up words from your native language in a thesaurus or a dictionary? What about figuring out how a certain piece of grammar works if you're unsure? Maybe you don't need that for your native language, but what about a second language you're learning?
If your native language is English, there are lots of resources, like online and book dictionaries/thesauruses or an extensive grammar (a book about how English grammar works). There's also a plethora of websites and courses to learn English, and large collections of written text or transcribed speech. If a linguist wants to know something about the English language there's an abundance of material. If someone wants to learn English it's easy and courses are offered in most parts of the world.
For other languages, the only published thing might be a list of 20 words and their translation into English or another lingua franca.
Let's take a look at the same map as earlier, but toggled to show documentation status in colour and endangerment status with shapes:
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Here, the green signifies a long grammar and the light green a grammar. Both are extensive descriptions of the grammar in a language, but they differ in length. A long grammar has to contain over 300 pages and a grammar over 150. Orange is another type of grammar, namely a grammar sketch. Those are brief overviews of the main grammatical features or features that may be of interest for linguists, typically between 20 and 50 pages. The purpose isn't to be a complete grammar, only a starting point.
The red dots can signify a lot of things, but what they have in common is that there's no extensive description of the grammar. In those cases, the best description of the language might be a list of which sounds it contains, a paper about a specific feature, a collection of texts or recordings, a dictionary, a wordlist (much shorter than dictionaries) or just a mention that it exists.
Why are grammars and descriptions even important?
The better described a language is, the easier it is to learn it and study it. For a community facing language loss, it might be helpful to have a pedagogical grammar or a dictionary to help teach the language to new generation. If the language becomes extinct people might still be able to learn and revive it from the documentation (like current efforts with Manx). It also makes sure unique words or grammatical features as well as knowledge encoded in the language isn't lost even if the language is. It's a way of preserving language, both for research and later learning.
What's an average amount of descripion then?
36,2% of all documented languages have either a grammar or a long grammar. That's pretty good actually
38,2% of all documented languages would be marked by a red dot on this map, meaning that more languages than that don't have any kind of grammar at all, maybe only as little as a short list of words
The remaining 25,6% have a grammar sketch
So as you see, the well documented languages are in minority. On the brighter side, linguists are working hard at describing languages and if they keep going at the same rate as they have since the 1950s, they'll reach the maximum level of description by 2084. Progress!
Tying into both description of languages and domains where language is used...
What about technology and language?
There are many digital tools for language. Translation services, spelling and grammar checks in word processors, unicode characters for different scripts and more. I'm going to focus on the first two:
Did you know that there are only 133 languages on google translate? 103 more are in the process of being added, but that's still a tiny percentage of all languages. As in 2% right now and 3,5% once these other languages are added going with the 6700 language estimation.
Of course, this is for the most part a limination with translation technology. You need translated texts containing millions of words to train the algorithms on and the majority of languages don't have that much written text, let alone translated into English. The low number still surprised me.
There are 106 official language packs for Windows 10 and I counted 260 writing standards you can use for spelling checks in Word. Most were separate languages, but lots were different ways to write the same language, like US or British English. That's a vanishingly small amount. But then again:
Do all languages have a written standard?
No. That much is clear. But how many do? I'll just quote Ethnologue on this:
"The exact number of unwritten languages is hard to determine. Ethnologue (25th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,168 living languages, 4,178 have a developed writing system. We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. The remaining 2,990 are likely unwritten."
(note that Ethnologue classes 334 languages without speakers as living, since their definition of living language is having a function for a contemporary language community. I think that's a bad definition and that means it differs from figures earlier in the post)
Spoken vs signed
My last point about average languages is about signed languages, because they're just as much of a language as spoken ones. One common misconception is that signed languages reflect or mimic the spoken language in the area, but they don't. Grammar works differently and some similarities in metaphor might be the only thing the signed language has in common with spoken language in the area.
Another common misconception is that there's only one sign language and that all signers understand each other. That's false, signed languages are just as different from each other as spoken languages, except for some tendencies regarding similarity between certain signs which often mimic an action (signs for eating are similar in many unrelated sign languages for example).
Glottolog lists 141 Deaf sign languages and 76 Rural sign languages, which are the two types of signed language that become entire languages. The difference is in reach.
Rural signs originate in villages with a critical amount of deaf people (around 6) that make up a fully fledged language with complete grammar to communicate. Often large parts of the village learn tha language as well. There are probably more than 76, that's just the ones the linguist community knows of.
What's called Deaf sign languages became a thing in the 1750s when a French guy named Charles-Michel de l'Épóe systematised and built onto a rural sign from Paris to create a national sign language which was then taught in deaf schools for all deaf children in France. Other countries took after the deaf school model and now there's 141 deaf sign languages, each connected to a different country. Much easier to count than spoken languages.
Many were made from scratch (probably building on some rural sign), but some countries recruited teachers from other countries that already had a natinonal sign language and learnt that instead. Of course they changed over time and with influence from children's local signs or home signs (rudimentary signs to communicate with hearing family, not complete languages), so now there's sign language families! The largest one unsurprisingly comes from LSF (Langue des Signes Française, the French one) and has 63 members, among them ASL.
What does this have to do with average languages? Well, languages don't have to be spoken, they can be signed instead. Even if they make up a small share of languages, we shouldn't forget them.
Now for some final words
Thank you for reading this far! I hope you found this interesting and have learned something new! Languages are exciting and this doesn't even go inte the nitty gritty of how different languages can be in their grammar, sounds and vocabulary. Lots of this seem self evident if you think about it, but I remember how someone pointing out facts like this truly shifted my perspective on what the language situation in the world truly looks like. The average language is a lot smaller and diffrerent from the common idea of a language I had before.
Please reblog this post if you liked it. I spent lots of time writing it because I'm passionate about this subject, but I'd love if it spread past my followers
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ukfrislandembassy · 6 months
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I think linguistics has a huge methodological problem, in that while there exist some formalised methodologies for conducting investigations, it's clear that you don't have to pursue any of them to actually get ahead academically because linguists aren't actually as scientifically rigorous as they would like to think.
This has knock-on effects for more general experimental design, because it is extremely common to find studies which purport to prove/disprove some hypothesis, but when you actually look at the methodology they use you find that it doesn't actually provide evidence for the point they're attempting to make.
Of course the most common place to find this kind of stuff is in the Generativist literature, which is awash with claims the phenomena they describe is only explainable through the assumption of Universal Grammar/a Language Organ/whatever, when in fact non-innatist models work just as well. But this isn't the only part of the field that is susceptible to this.
So for instance there was a paper put out in Science recently that claims to have found evidence to counteract the idea that social structure can have an impact on the structure of the language (most notably explicated by Peter Trudgill in his 2011 book Sociolinguistic Typology, give it a read if you can find it). They take demographic data from Ethnologue and compares this with a couple of metrics which supposedly quantify linguistic complexity.
Leaving aside the (sometimes glaring) issues with the way the metrics are defined (they perhaps could have done with reading Dahl 2004 The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity), we can already spot a major problem with using these correlations to make claims regarding the Sociolinguistic Typology hypothesis: the phenomena in question are explicitly diachronic in nature, but the data being used to assess them is solely synchronic.
What do I mean by this? It's been suggested that English morphology is less complex relative to e.g. German because of contact with the large numbers of Old Norse speakers that settled in the Danelaw. The trouble is, of course, that all those Norse speakers later shifted to English, so this large community of L2 learners won't show up in the data, despite the effects still being apparent after over 1000 years. Similar points can be made about most of the languages where these kinds of effects have been proposed: it was precisely the process of these languages spreading rapidly and acquiring a large speakerbase in a disorganised fashion that cause these changes to occur. Indeed, the authors specifically note that education and official language status are factors that would mitigate against the failures of L2 transmission that are claimed to cause these simplification effects, but don't then seem to acknowledge that this is a major issue for extrapolating the correlations anywhere further back than the 19th Century.
I think there are several things going on here which have led to this kind of thing being possible. Firstly, linguistics has always had an uneasy continuing relationship with the rest of the humanities and parts of the sciences (particularly neurobiology and acoustics), because it touches on so many of them at once. Secondly, and relatedly, we've had a fairly significant period where the core theoretical concerns of linguistics were essentially driven by a philosopher (Chomsky), which created a model of research that explicitly rejected empirical work and argued for much of its base assumptions (such as 'Poverty of the Stimulus') almost entirely by thought experiment. Empirically minded subfields continued to exist (Trudgill for instance made his career as a sociolinguist), but empiricism has been slow to make a return to theoretical linguistics. As a result, it seems to me that, at least in typology, people are still getting to grips with the idea of formulating hypotheses and actually working out tests that actually assess those hypotheses. Thirdly, because again of Chomsky, linguistics has had a strongly mathematical character in terms of its conception of language, and this again still lingers in the design of these kinds of studies. Everything has to be quantified in such a way that a simple computer model can work with it, but the trouble is there's frequently little room for the nuances of individual languages (e.g. Irish and Welsh are both counted on WALS as having the same value for inflection on adpositions, but actually a detailed study of the two languages reveals their systems work really quite differently, as I'll perhaps post on another time) which can therefore have knock-on effects for the analysis of any correlations thus derived.
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akozuheiwa · 1 year
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I'm curious! I only included the six largest families according to the Ethnologue, since there's a Lot of them, but let me know yours in the tags!
Please reblog for bigger sample size <3
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useless-catalanfacts · 5 months
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What language(s) do you think are the closest to Catalan in terms of vocabulary, syntax, conjugation, etc?
Without a doubt, Occitan is the closest language to Catalan. In fact, even until the 19th century, Occitan and Catalan were often considered variants of the same language.
After Occitan, the next closest languages are other members of the Galloromance group: Aragonese, French, Arpitan, and some Gallotalian languages like Piedmontese.
That's in general, taking into account grammar. If we look only at words, the closest (outside of Occitan) seems to be Italian. You can find the percentages in this table (format made by me using the data from Ethnologue):
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Highlights to answer your question:
Catalan and Italian: 87%
Catalan and French: 85%
Catalan and Spanish: 85%
Catalan and Portuguese: 85%
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readyforevolution · 10 months
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FACTS ABOUT CAMEROON
Fast facts
Official name: Republic of Cameroon
Capital city: Yaounde
Population: 27,744,989
Area: 475,440 sq km
Major languages: English, French
Time zone: UTC+1 (West Africa Time)
– Source: CIA World Fact Book
1. Archaeological evidence suggests the African country of Cameroon has been inhabited by humans for at least 50,000 years.
– Source: Britannica
2. Cameroon is often referred to as “Africa in miniature” due to its geographical and cultural diversity.
– Source: BBC News
3. Cameroon is home to over 200 different ethnic groups and has been described as an “ethnic crossroads”.
– Source: Britannica
4. There are as many as 275 local languages spoken in Cameroon, making it one of the most linguistically diverse countries.
– Source: Ethnologue
5. In fact, Cameroon is the ninth most linguistically diverse country in the world and the second in Africa after Nigeria.
– Source: Ethnologue
6. The flag of Cameroon 🇨🇲 comprises vertically strips of green, red and yellow with a central yellow star. The star symbolises national unity, the green stripe symbolises the vegetation of the south, the yellow the savannas of the north and the red represents a link between the north and south and stands for national sovereignty.
– Source: Britannica
7. The first Europeans to explore Cameroon were Portuguese navigators who sailed up the Wouri River in 1472.
– Source: Britannica
8. They initially named the river Rio dos Camarões (River of Shrimps), after the numerous shrimps found there.
– Source: Britannica
9. After the First World War, Cameroon was divided between Britain and France, then in 1961, the two colonies unified after gaining independence and became the United Republic of Cameroon.
– Source: Britannica
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full-on-sam · 4 months
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Hey you! Are you working with a new language in your WIP?
Or do you need to research how different world languages work?
Then do yourself a favour and use ethnologue
It is a website where everything about all languages is documented and constantly kept upt to date. It explains how languages work as a system. What languages are dying. How many people speak which languages. You can select from a menu and research each language you need. And rest assured there are more than 7000 among which to choose, because the aim of the website is to analyse and research and document *all existing lanaguages* even dialects. There are professional linguists that use this and contribute to it.
Guys it's GOOD I promise. I use it a lot for my uni work.
@olive-riggzey may it be of interest?
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Hawaiian Crow / 'Alalā — Corvus Hawaiiensis
For context i started this because i came across a post on my "For You" tab on my main ((Sharkthe-cat)) awhile back talking about an endangered lynx, and i think it said something about it being an animal of the day. If i find it, i'll link it here. But i loved that idea so i figured i'd do that myself, but with endangered organisms and languages, sort of as an outlet for my passion for ((endangered)) languages and my many researching sessions of endangered animals as a kid.
This will also likely take inspiration form the channel imshawn getoffmylawn, please check out his channel, it has lots of really cool videos on obscure and endangered languages, so you may find it of interest if you're a language nerd like me.
My main sources will be Wikipedia and the Ethnologue ((for languages from the Americas and the Pacific as i only have that version at the moment)), and i will attempt at posting once per day, alternating between both organisms and languages.
I always appreciate corrections, please let me know if i have gotten a fact wrong, if you have any other feedback, or literally have anything to say i'd love to know your thoughts on this :D
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IUCN 3.1 status — EW (Extinct in the wild)
NatureServe status — GH (Possibly extinct)
Population: 120 (all in breeding programs)
Distribution: Hawai'i Island, Hawai'i, USA
"Family Tree:"
Family - Corvidae
Subgenus - Corvinae
Genus - Corvus
Etymology:
'Alalā is the Hawaiian word for to cry, bleat, squeal, bawl, etc., and the crow itself was given that name for its distinctive call.
Programs: Keahou and Maui Bird Conservation Centres
As with many other crows, Hawaiian crows are known for their intelligence and socialness. Captive individuals use sticks as tools to extract food from holes drilled in logs, and juveniles are known to use them without training or learning from others. They are regarded as 'aumākua, or family guardians, by some native Hawaiians.
The 'alalā are the most endangered species in the family corvidae and the only corvid left in Hawai'i, and they have been extinct in the wild since 2002. In the wild, their main predator was the Hawaiian hawk (which itself is near threatened). Most crows adapt very well to humans presence, but the 'alalā population has gone down drastically in their presence. Their population decreased due to various reasons, including deforestation (as with many other species), the introduction of non-native species (cats, dogs, mongooses, rats), and in particular, avian malaria, caused by deforestation allowing the rise of invasive plants and mosquitoes. They are considered to be an indicator species by scientists (a species that is used by scientists to represent the state of the area based on how well it's doing in its environment), and the absence of them has caused many plant species that rely on them to suffer as a result.
Bibliography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_crow
https://volcanoheritagecottages.com/2021/11/13/the-recovery-story-of-hawaiis-revered-alala/
https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/alala-hawaiian-crow
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molkolsdal · 1 month
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The Inku Language
"Inku is an Indo-Aryan language spoken, at least historically, throughout Afghanistan by four of the country's nomadic communities: the Jalali, the Pikraj, the Shadibaz and the Vangawala.
Each of the four groups speaks a variety with slight differences compared to the others. According to their local tradition, their ancestors migrated in the 19th century from the Dera Ismail Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan regions of present-day Pakistan. Such an origin suggests that Inku may be related to the Saraiki language spoken there, though nothing is conclusively known.
The total population of the four Inku-speaking groups was estimated to be 7,000 as of the end of the 1970s. There is no reliable information about their present state, though it is unlikely that many have survived the subsequent upheavals in the country, and according to the entry in Ethnologue, which however may not necessarily refer to this language, the last speakers "probably survived into the 1990s".
Linguistic materials about the varieties spoken by the Shadibaz, Vangawala and Pikraj were collected by Aparna Rao in the 1970s, but they have not been published or analysed yet.
The following is an extract of a text narrated in 1978 by a man of the Chenarkhel subgroup of the Vangawala:
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baeddel · 1 year
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something i'm learning about linguistics is that 'faith-based' Chrsitian organizations represent a huge part of the funding and publishing of linguistics-related work, out of an interest to support missionaries, translate the bible, etc., to evangelize speakers of remote, minority languages. for example SIL and their Ethnologue. and that while they get criticized for it, people do have to work with them and use their material to do what they do. the textbook i'm reading right now i just learned was written by a SIL guy.
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sabrinedz · 2 months
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Portrait d’une famille kabyle (1935-1937)
De Thérèse Rivière, ethnologue et photographe française.
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mapsontheweb · 8 months
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Languages of Mali.
by georgianmaps
Mali is a multilingual country, Ethnologue counts more than 80 languages. Of these, Bambara, Bobo, Bozo, Dogon, Fula, Hassaniya, Kassonke, Maninke, Minyanka, Senufo, Songhay languages, Soninke and Tamasheq are official languages. 🇲🇱 Bambara is by far the most widely spoken language, spoken by 80% of the population as their first or second language. 🇫🇷 French, which was introduced during the colonial period, remained the official language at independence until 2023. According to the last estimates about 17% of the population speaks French as second language.
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Statistics time!
So, I was procastrinating on finishing up the word descriptions (only 14 left!) and decided to do some statistics on the submitted words instead. I was expecting a lot of Indo-European languages and languages spoken in Europe, which was true. This is a bit sad, since most people on tumblr have the most exposure to Indo-European languages and I wanted to show more diversity. There is diversity, don't get me wrong, it's just heavily skewed. Let's look at some statistics! Image ID:s are in alt text.
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As you see, over half of the languages are Indo-European, and three more are creoles where vocabulary is based mostly on Indo-European languages. LSF-ish is a sign language family! There are still 12 language families in 64 words, that's pretty good work!
This chart only showed languages, so let's look at the distribution of words over languages instead. The staples are colour coded with the same key as the last diagram to show language family. The order is different because I had sorted them by area instead of family
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Based on this the distribution looks a little bit better: many of the Indo-European ones only have one submission while several languages from other families have more submissions. Six of the seven languages with four submissions are still Indo-European though.
Let's take a closer look at the Indo-European ones!
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Only two of them are from the Indo-Aryan branch which makes up the majority of the Indo-Iranian branch, aka the Indo-European languages outside of Europe. Fun fact: Out of the 582 Indo-European languages, 320 of them belong to the Indo-Iranian branch. That is the majority. Why don't we talk about them more? (The answer is eurocentrism. Seriously, I knew they existed but not that they were this many until I started studying linguistics. The MAJORITY of the language family presented as the European one are spoken outside of Europe).
There are 8 Germanic languages in the tournament. This isn't that weird since they apparently make up 18% of Indo-European languages. I didn't know that until I made the maths right now, that's wild.
The Slavic branch is number two, but since they barely make up 4% of Indo-European languages it's a massive overrepresentation. I did not think there was such a big difference between Germanic and Slavic languages. For comparison, Romance languages make up 13%.
While still speaking of the Indo-European languages, is it a big family comparatively? According to Glottolog it's the third largest after Atlantic-Congo languages (1406 languages) and Austronesian languages (1271 languages). Notice how 587 is a much lower number? Anyway, most language families are much smaller so it's a big one.
Ethnologue on the other hand, says that Indo-European languages are number five on the list with 448 languages, after Niger-Congo languages (same as Atlantic Congo), Austronesian languages, Trans-New Guinea languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. Remember that post on what's a language and what's a dialect? This is an example of that, except that it also begs the question of how much proof you need to say a language belongs to a certain family. For example, the Trans-New Guinea family has many languages/language groups that might belong to it but linguists disagree or have too little proof. It's complicated. Honestly, I trust Glottologue more on this, it has sources and a focus on family classification.
Onto other subjects, namely geographical areas: We have established that there are lots of Indo-European languages here. But how about geographical distribution?
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54% of languages in the tournament are spoken in Europe. Note that I've classified Portugese as spoken in America in this case, since the words were in the Brazilian Portugese dialect. Almost half the languages aren't spoken in Europe though, so that's still pretty good.
Unless? Let's compare this to data on the distribution of all languages and the distribution of population, data blatantly stolen from my professor's powerpoint:
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Yeah. 4% of languages are spoken in Europe, yet 54% of languages in this tournament are from there. I miss African languages in particular, they make up 30% and yet there's only one in the poll (which is extra sad because many are very interesting linguistically speaking). There are also fewer Asian languages than one would suspect based on both number of languages and people. The American number needs comment too: only one of the languages in question is native american (Would that still be a correct term for a language in today's Mexico?).
Another interesting thing about the later two diagrams is Oceania: 1% of the population and 19% of the languages. At least half of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea, the Indonesian half might count as Asia?) should be included in that number, which can be part of why it skyrockets. 1050 of the world's 6500-7500 languages one one island (and the smaller islands surrounding it), most of the languages small. It's a fascinating place.
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the statistical analysis! This was not meant as an attack on anyone who submitted Indo-European or European words since many of them are banger words, it was merely an observation of an expected outcome, based on the fact that the tumblr userbase is largely Western, so of course European languages will be the native language of many and overrepresented in submissions. Procastrination done, please tell me what you thought
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reno-matago · 11 months
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do you have any recommendations to look into French witchcraft?
english or french texts would be wonderful
- Claude Seignolles • Les Évangiles du Diable (contient des grimoires), in-con-tour-nable!
- Le Picatrix, La Poule Noire, Le grand et le petit Albert...
- Christophe Auray : L'herbier des paysans, des guérisseurs et des sorciers
- Dominique Camus (livres)
- Jean-Luc Caradeau sans doute?
- Jeanne Favret-Saada, ethnologue
- Paul Sebillot Le Folklore de France - ( Précieux!) (Pdf dispos www.berose.fr)
- Ce site regorge de Folklore français:
@wanderersinn et j'en oublie! Désolé j'ai supprimé le message par erreur!
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