How many languages are there in the world?
Seems like it should be an easy question, right? Not so much. Just like the issue of biological species (that I touched upon in Wednesday's post, about dogs and wolves), figuring out where to draw dividing lines in linguistics isn't simple. How different do two modes of speech or writing have to be to constitute separate languages?
Here's an admittedly rather facile example from my own experience. I grew up speaking both French and English; for three of my grandparents, and my mom, French was their first language. What I heard, though, was Cajun French, a dialect brought into southern Louisiana by people who had been exiled from Acadia (now called Nova Scotia) in the mid-eighteenth century. (In my mother's family's case, they did a thirty year stint in France first, and left on the 1785 Acadian Expeditions when the king of France decided they weren't fitting in and basically paid them to go away. Just as well; they missed the French Revolution, which broke out only four years later. A couple of years after that, the king regretted not going with them.)
What's interesting, though, is that when I go to Québec, I have a really hard time understanding spoken French. Part of it is that admittedly, I'm a bit rusty; I haven't been around francophones for forty years. But the accent is so different from what I'm used to that it often befuddles me. Further still are French-based creoles like Haitian Creole, Antillean Creole, and Seychellois; those have a lot of French vocabulary but a great admixture of words (and grammatical structures) from African languages, particularly from western Volta-Congo languages such as Fongbe and Igbo (for the first two) and the Bantu language (for Seychellois).
And I can verify that Haitian Creole and French aren't mutually intelligible. A well-meaning principal I worked for was welcoming in a young lady who was a refugee from Haiti, and told her that I was someone she could speak to in her native language -- assuming that Haitian Creole and French were close enough that we could chat. She and I had a good laugh when we found out that neither of us spoke the other's language, so we had to get by on her broken English supplemented when necessary with my rather ill-remembered French, when the words were at least close enough to help.
Another example is Breton, a Celtic language related to Welsh that's spoken in Brittany. My band recorded a couple of songs in Breton (here's one example), and a friend noticed how much it sounded like French. Like Haitian Creole, though, it really is a different language, with its own grammar, syntax, and lexicon -- but enough borrowed words and pronunciation influence from French that it has a superficially French sound.
So even with currently extant languages, it's hard to know where to draw the lines. Standard French, Cajun French, and Québecois are usually considered close enough to count as the same language (more specifically, as three dialects -- the linguistic analog to a subspecies). Breton, and the creoles I listed, are universally considered to be separate languages. The current estimate is that there are now around seven thousand languages spoken in the world, although that number gets revised all the time as we learn more about them.
The situation becomes even more difficult when you start considering languages across time. Languages evolve, despite the prescriptivists' best efforts, and -- once again, like with biological evolution -- it's an open debate where you draw the line. English today is pretty similar to English spoken in England and eastern North America in the eighteenth century; a few different words and some odd (to our ears) grammar, is all. Go back to Shakespeare's day, and it was more different still, although -- with practice -- modern readers can see a performance of Macbeth or As You Like It and understand what's being said. (And even, in the latter, be able to laugh at most of the bawdy jokes.) Back in Chaucer's times, today's English speakers would have a difficult time of it. And actual Old English -- no, Shakespeare isn't "Old English," even if you've heard it called that -- is a completely different, mutually unintelligible language with Modern English. For example, can you identify this passage?
Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa,
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
If you recognized it as the opening lines of the Lord's Prayer, you're either a language nerd or else really good at picking out patterns. Old English was a language related to a dialect of West Germanic spoken in Saxony -- on the border of what is now Denmark and Germany -- and so unlike Modern English that if you went back to tenth century England, you'd need a handy phrase book to be understood.
The reason all this comes up is because I stumbled upon a site listing "spurious languages" -- written or spoken systems that we once thought were languages, and now we are kind of saying, "Um, maybe not." And there are a lot of them. Some, like Malakhel -- an Eastern Iranian dialect spoken in the Waziristan region of Pakistan -- were, like Cajun French, found to be close enough to an existing language (Ormuri) that the two were combined. Some, like Dazawa, a Chadic language spoken in northern Nigeria, are so poorly studied we honestly don't know if they're separate languages or not; in the case of Dazawa, there are only a handful of speakers, and most of them have switched to speaking the majority language of Hausa, so it might be too late to find out. Some, like Palpa, a language supposedly spoken by a small group of people in Nepal, are probably due to inaccuracies in study, and may never have existed in the first place.
Then there are languages (probably?) that are known from only an inscription or two, so there's not enough information available even to make a firm determination. One of many examples is Noric, a presumed Celtic language spoken in the Roman province of Noricum (present-day Austria and Slovenia), known from a grand total of three short inscriptions.
It's written in Old Italic script, an alphabet also used for the only-distantly-related Etruscan language. This particular one appears to be a record of a financial transaction. Another, found near Ptuj, Slovenia, says:
𐌀𐌓𐌕𐌄𐌁𐌖𐌈𐌆𐌁𐌓𐌏𐌙𐌈𐌖𐌉 (ARTEBUDZBROGDUI)It's thought to be a personal name -- Artebudz, son of Brogduos. Linguists suspect that the name Artebudz comes from Celtic root words meaning "bear penis," which I think we can all agree is a hell of a name.
The thing is, with only short bits to analyze, any determination of what this language was, who (other than Bear Penis) spoke it, how widespread and long-lived it was, and how it was related to other languages at the time, are all little more than educated speculation.
It's astonishing to think that even as small as the world has gotten, what with near-instantaneous digital communication, international travel, and maps of damn near the entire planet, we still have a hard time pinning down language. It's fluid, ever-changing, dynamic, with new forms cropping up all the time and old ones dying out or being subsumed. But that's part of the fascination of linguistics, isn't it? Something like speech and the written word, that most of us take for granted, is actually phenomenally complex, to the point of being nearly impossible to pigeonhole.
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