What a world we live in!
Whether we are hearing, listening or speaking it's mandatory we understand each other through interpretation and translation. The official list of languages in the world is 6,909. Here at Innovative Hearing Devices we offer a great variety of devices to make hearing each other possible. We are committed to spreading these devices around the world so that no language becomes extinct. You may call us directly (619) 981-9822
Our website: http://www.innovativehearingdevices.com
The story of the tower of Babel takes place about 130 years after the flood. It is a brief story but one which raises some interesting questions about how people learned to communicate with each other.
Whether it is in written form or the spoken word through the translation process, verbal interpreting, audio or video voiceovers or transcriptions, we need to pay particular attention to the subtle differences in language and culture that are critical in conveying your message to your target audience.
For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese, Hakka, Shanghainese, etc. are just as different from one another (and from the dominant Mandarin) as Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian.
We might propose, then, that instead of counting languages in terms of external forms, we might try to count the range of distinct grammars in the world. How might we do this? What differentiates one grammar from another? Some aspects of grammatical knowledge, like the way pronouns are interpreted with respect to another expression in the same sentence, seem to be common across languages. In She thinks that Mary is smart, the pronoun she can refer to any female in the universe with one exception: she here cannot refer to the same individual as Mary. This seems to be a fact not about English, but about language in general, because the same facts recur in every language when the structural relations are the same. On the other hand, the fact that adjectives precede their nouns in English (we say a red balloon, not a balloon red) is a fact about English, since the opposite is true, for instance, in French.
Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Out of Ethnologue’s 6,909, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.
Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed (apart from the status of French in Canada) in terms of English vs. Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre-contact times, over 300 languages were spoken in North America. Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. But that still leaves about 165 of North America’s indigenous languages spoken at least to some extent today.
Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree of that diversity one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising proportion of the world’s languages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak.
Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree of that diversity one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising proportion of the world’s languages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak.
The economic argument does not really supply a reason for speakers of a “small” and perhaps unwritten language to abandon that language simply because they also need to learn a widely used language such as English or Mandarin Chinese. Where there is no one dominant local language, and groups with diverse linguistic heritages come into regular contact with one another, multilingualism is a perfectly natural condition. When a language dies, a world dies with it, in the sense that a community’s connection with its past, its traditions and its base of specific knowledge are all typically lost as the vehicle linking people to that knowledge is abandoned. This is not a necessary step, however, for them to become participants in a larger economic or political order.
LET'S KEEP TALKING TO AND HEARING EACH OTHER
