Language Families: Discussion Points

• How many languages are spoken in the world? (Roughly 5,000)
• What are the most widely-spoken languages?
  Eight languages are spoken by some three billion people, or half of the world population. They are Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
• In what ways can one compare languages or discuss their relatedness to one another? What would be the point of such a discussion?
  Languages are usually discussed in terms of common histories, places where they are spoken and the people who speak them, and similarities or differences in lexicon, writing systems, sounds, and a variety grammatical features. Such discussions are common in the area of linguistics, but are useful in many other contexts such as history and anthropology, when one wants to explore human behavior, migration patterns, and cultures throughout time.
• Languages are often discussed in terms of families. E.g., the Romance language family includes Latin, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and French. The Slavic languages include Polish, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Belarusan, Ukrainian, Russian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. The Semitic language family includes languages like Akkadian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Amharic. Many language families are grouped together and linked to a larger family and often to a common "mother language." For example, the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance language families are some of the branches of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Semitic is considered the parent language of all ancient and modern Semitic languages. Semitic languages, in turn, are one of the branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family, which also includes the Cushitic languages of northern East Africa, the Chadic languages of western Africa, and the Berber languages spoken in North Africa.