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Topic Review
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules and representation. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign. Human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation and coordination. There are two main guiding principles in first-language acquisition: speech perception always precedes speech production and the gradually evolving system by which a child learns a language is built up one step at a time, beginning with the distinction between individual phonemes. Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition for many years question how language is acquired, Lidz et al. states "The question of how these structures are acquired, then, is more properly understood as the question of how a learner takes the surface forms in the input and converts them into abstract linguistic rules and representations." Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whether that be spoken language or signed language as a result of prelingual deafness, though it can also refer to bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA), which refers to an infant's simultaneous acquisition of two native languages. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages. In addition to speech, reading and writing a language with an entirely different script compounds the complexities of true foreign language literacy. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language.
  • 37.8K
  • 18 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Gender Fair Language
Gender fair language (GFL) is language used with the intention of reducing gender bias in one's mental representation, or mental understanding of an idea. Gender fair language includes gender-neutral (English singular they) and gender-inclusive language (English he or she). Feminization strategies of gender fair language use gender-inclusive language. Neutralization strategies of gender fair language use gender-neutral language. Some languages however are genderless rendering such strategies superfluous. Gender fair language focuses on grammatical gender, where gender is marked grammatically in the language. Gender fair language does not interact with gender noun classes, in which some languages categorize nouns. Gender fair language concerns grammatical gender marking on nouns that reference humans, where the gender marking is in accordance with the gender of the human. Gender marking occurs the most in gendered languages, like German, Spanish, and French, where all nouns are grammatically gendered. In these languages, gender fair language generally applies to nouns, pronouns, role nouns (e.g. German der Lehrer "teacher; m."), and possessive pronouns. Grammatical gender is also marked to a lesser extent in natural gender languages, like English and Swedish, in which animate referents are grammatically gendered according to their intrinsic gender. In these languages, gender fair language generally applies only to pronouns and possessive pronouns. Every language has its own method for grammatical gender marking, and thus gender fair language applies differently to each language to match its need.
  • 19.4K
  • 09 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Subject–Verb–Object
In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate oranges." The label often includes ergative languages that do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object (AVO) order. SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 75% of the world's languages. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially "obvious" to human psychology. Languages regarded as SVO include: All Bantu languages, Albanian, Arabic dialects, Assyrian, Bosnian, Bulgarian,[a 1] Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish (but see below), French, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic (with the V2 restriction), Igbo, Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay (Indonesian, Malaysian), Modern Hebrew, Norwegian (with the V2 restriction), Polish, Portuguese, Quiché, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Russian (but see below), Slovene, Spanish, Swedish (with the V2 restriction), Thai and Lao, Ukrainian (but see below), Vietnamese and Yoruba. Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.
  • 11.4K
  • 29 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Subject–object–verb
In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate oranges" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects.
  • 10.7K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Second Language Acquisition
Second language acquisition, or SLA, is the process by which people learn languages in addition to their native tongue(s). The term second language is used to describe any language whose acquisition starts after early childhood (including what may be the third or subsequent language learned). The language to be learned is often referred to as the "target language" or "L2"; SLA is sometimes called L2A, for "L2 acquisition". The term "language acquisition" became commonly used after Stephen Krashen contrasted it with formal and non-constructive "learning." Today, most scholars use "language learning" and "language acquisition" interchangeably, unless they are directly addressing Krashen's work. However, "second language acquisition" or "SLA" has become established as the preferred term for this academic discipline. The study of SLA is usually viewed as part of applied linguistics.
  • 9.8K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Linguistic Universal
A linguistic universal is a statement that is true for all natural languages. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or All spoken languages have consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to linguistic typology, and intends to reveal information about how the human brain processes language. The field was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who from a set of some thirty languages derived a set of basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax.
  • 9.3K
  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Indigenous Aryans
Indigenous Aryans, also known as the Out of India theory (OIT), is the idea that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. Reflecting traditional Indian views based on the Puranic chronology, the indigenist view proposes an older date than is generally accepted for the Vedic period, and argues that the Indus Valley Civilization was a Vedic civilization. In this view, "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati (or Indus) tradition (7000 or 8000 BCE)." It is presented as an alternative to the established migration model, which proposes the Pontic steppe as the area of origin of the Indo-European languages. The proposal is based on traditional and religious views on Indian history and identity, and plays a signifcant role in Hindutva politics. Support for this idea mostly exists among Indian scholars of Hindu religion and the history and archaeology of India, and has no support in mainstream scholarship.
  • 7.4K
  • 13 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Ge'ez
Ge'ez (/ˈɡiːɛz/; ግዕዝ, Gəʿəz Template:IPA-gez; also transliterated Gi'iz) is an ancient South Semitic language of the Ethiosemitic branch. The language originates from the region encompassing northern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Today, Ge'ez is used only as the main language of liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Catholic churches, and the Beta Israel Jewish community. However, in Ethiopia, Amharic or other local languages, and in Eritrea and Ethiopia's Tigray Region, Tigrinya may be used for sermons. Amharic, Tigrinya, and Tigre are closely related to Ge'ez. The closest living languages to Ge'ez are Tigre and Tigrinya with lexical similarity at 71% and 68%, respectively. Some linguists do not believe that Ge'ez constitutes a common ancestor of modern Ethiosemitic languages, but that Ge'ez became a separate language early on from another hypothetical unattested language, which can be seen as an extinct sister language of Amharic, Tigre and Tigrinya. The foremost Ethiopian experts such as Amsalu Aklilu point to the vast proportion of inherited nouns that are unchanged, and even spelled identically in both Ge'ez and Amharic (and to a lesser degree, Tigrinya).
  • 6.6K
  • 17 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Old Aramaic Language
Old Aramaic refers to the earliest stage of the Aramaic language, considered to give way to Middle Aramaic by the 3rd century (a conventional date is the rise of the Sasanian Empire in 224 AD). Emerging as the language of the city-states of the Arameans in the Levant in the Early Iron Age, Old Aramaic was adopted as a lingua franca, and in this role was inherited for official use by the Achaemenid Empire during classical antiquity. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum and the development of differing written standards.
  • 5.6K
  • 21 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Gaulish Language
Gaulish was an ancient Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of Gaul (modern-day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine). In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe ("Noric"), parts of the Balkans, and Anatolia ("Galatian"), which are thought to have been closely related. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish. Together with Lepontic and the Celtiberian language spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, Gaulish helps form the geographic group of Continental Celtic languages. The precise linguistic relationships among them, as well as between them and the modern Insular Celtic languages, are uncertain and a matter of ongoing debate because of their sparse attestation. Gaulish is found in some 800 (often fragmentary) inscriptions including calendars, pottery accounts, funeral monuments, short dedications to gods, coin inscriptions, statements of ownership, and other texts, possibly curse tablets. Gaulish texts were first written in the Greek alphabet in southern France and in a variety of the Old Italic script in northern Italy. After the Roman conquest of those regions, writing shifted to the use of the Latin alphabet. During his conquest of Gaul, Caesar reported that the Helvetii were in possession of documents in the Greek script, and all Gaulish coins used the Greek script until about 50 BC. Gaulish in Western Europe was supplanted by Vulgar Latin and various Germanic languages from around the 5th century AD onwards. It is thought to have gone extinct some time around the late 6th century.
  • 5.3K
  • 01 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Style (Sociolinguistics)
In sociolinguistics, a style is a set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic style—without variation there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings. Variation can occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically. Many approaches to interpreting and defining style incorporate the concepts of indexicality, indexical order, stance-taking, and linguistic ideology. Note that a style is not a fixed attribute of a speaker. Rather, a speaker may use different styles depending on context. Additionally, speakers often incorporate elements of multiple styles into their speech, either consciously or subconsciously, thereby creating a new style.
  • 4.6K
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Lingua Franca
A lingua franca is any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers. The de facto status of lingua franca is usually "awarded" by the masses to the language of the most influential nation(s) of the time. Any given language normally becomes a lingua franca primarily by being used for international commerce, but can be accepted in other cultural exchanges, especially diplomacy. Occasionally the term "lingua franca" is applied to a fully established formal language; thus formerly it was said that French was the lingua franca of diplomacy. The term "lingua franca" was originally used by Arabs to name all Romance languages, and especially Italian (Arabs used the name 'Franks' for all peoples in Western Europe). Then, it meant a language with a Romance lexicon (most words derived from Latin which then evolved into early forms of Spanish and Italian) and a very simple grammar, that till the end of the 19th century was used by mariners in the Mediterranean Sea, particularly in the Middle East and Northern Africa. A related concept is that of a “vehicular language.” It is defined as a basic linguistic structure for proposed “international auxiliary languages,” for example, the use of an Indo-European language, or Indo-European itself, in the development of Esperanto.
  • 4.3K
  • 20 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Verb–Subject–Object
In linguistic typology, a verb–subject–object (VSO) language is one in which the most typical sentences arrange their elements in that order, as in Ate Sam oranges (Sam ate oranges). VSO is the third-most common word order among the world's languages, after SOV (as in Hindi and Japanese) and SVO (as in English and Mandarin). Families where all or many of the languages are VSO include the following: Spanish resembles Semitic languages such as Arabic in allowing for both VSO and SVO structures: "Jesús vino el jueves"/"Vino Jesús el jueves, "Tu madre dice que no vayas"/"Dice tu madre que no vayas". Many languages, such as Greek, have relatively free word order, where VSO is one of many possible orders. Low level programming languages such as assembly tend to follow VSO order in how they assign bits in a memory word. Although the bit sizes vary between architectures, the general form consists of an opcode (verb) followed by a combination of memory or register addresses (subjects) and/or values (objects).
  • 4.1K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Old Spanish Language
Old Spanish, also known as Old Castilian (Spanish: castellano antiguo; Template:Lang-osp [roˈmantse kasteˈʎano]) or Medieval Spanish (Spanish: español medieval), was originally a colloquial Latin spoken in the provinces of the Roman Empire that provided the root for the early form of the Spanish language that was spoken on the Iberian Peninsula from the 10th century until roughly the beginning of the 15th century, before a consonantal readjustment gave rise to the evolution of modern Spanish. The poem Cantar de Mio Cid (The Poem of the Cid), published around 1200, remains the best known and most extensive work of literature in Old Spanish.
  • 4.0K
  • 26 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Newspeak
Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime, as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy. In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, George Orwell explains that Newspeak usage follows most of the English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. Linguistically, the contractions of Newspeak—Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), etc.—derive from the syllabic abbreviations of Russian, which identify the government and social institutions of the Soviet Union, such as politburo (Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Comintern (Communist International), kolkhoz (collective farm), and Komsomol (Young Communists' League). The long-term political purpose of the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles—the working-class of Oceania—to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050; during that 66-year transition, the usage of Oldspeak (Standard English) shall remain interspersed among Newspeak conversations. Newspeak is also a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, which Orwell promoted (1942–44) during the Second World War (1939–45), and later rejected in the essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946), wherein he criticizes the bad usage of English in his day: dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which produce the meaningless words of doublespeak, the product of unclear reasoning. Orwell's conclusion thematically reiterates linguistic decline: "I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions."
  • 3.5K
  • 08 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Pre–Indo-European Languages
Pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages, not necessarily related to one another, that existed in prehistoric Europe and South Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts date from the 19th century BC in Kültepe in modern-day Turkey, and while estimates vary widely, spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at the latest by the third millennium BC (see Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses). Thus the Pre-Indo-European languages must have developed earlier than, or in some cases alongside, the Indo-European languages that ultimately displaced them. A handful of these languages still survive; in Europe, Basque retains a localized strength with fewer than a million native speakers, while the Dravidian languages of South Asia remain very widespread there, with over 200 million native speakers. Some of the pre-Indo-European languages are attested only as linguistic substrates in Indo-European languages. A few others (such as Etruscan, Minoan, Iberian, etc.) are also attested from inscriptions.
  • 3.5K
  • 02 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Language Attrition
Language attrition is the loss of a first or second language or a portion of that language by either a community or an individual. Language attrition is related to multilingualism and language acquisition. Many factors are at play in learning (acquisition) and unlearning (loss) the first and second languages. This can be a simple reversal of learning. In other cases, the type and speed of attrition depends on the individual, also on his or her age and skill level. For the same second language, attrition has been affected differently depending on what is the dominant first language environment. In many cases, attrition could well be case-by-case. Those language learners motivated to keep their first and second languages may very well maintain it, although to do so will likely involve continuous study, or regular use of both.
  • 3.4K
  • 01 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Proto-Romanian Language
Proto-Romanian (also known as "Common Romanian", româna comună or "Ancient Romanian", străromâna, Balkan Latin) is a hypothetical and unattested Romance language evolved from Vulgar Latin and considered to have been spoken by the ancestors of today's Romanians and related Balkan Latin peoples (Vlachs) before c. 900 (7th–11th century AD). In the 9th century Proto-Romanian already had a structure very distinct from the other Romance languages, with major differences in grammar, morphology and phonology and already was a member of the Balkan language area. Most of its features can be found in the modern Balkan Romance languages. It already contained around a hundred loans from Slavic languages, including words such as trup (body, flesh), as well as some Greek language loans via Vulgar Latin, but no Hungarian and Turkish words as these nations had yet to arrive in the region. According to the Romanian theory, it evolved into the following modern languages and their dialects: The first language that broke the unity was Aromanian, in the 9th century, followed shortly after by Megleno-Romanian. Istro-Romanian was the last to break the link with Daco-Romanian in the 11th century. The place where Proto-Romanian formed is still under debate; most historians put it just to the north of the Jireček Line. See: Origin of Romanians. The Roman occupation led to a Roman-Thracian syncretism, and similar to the case of other conquered civilisation (see Gallo-Roman culture developed in Roman Gaul), had as final result the Latinization of many Thracian tribes which were on the edge of the sphere of Latin influence, eventually resulting in the possible extinction of the Daco-Thracian language (unless, of course, Albanian is its descendant), but traces of it are still preserved in the Eastern Romance substratum. From the 2nd century AD, the Latin spoken in the Danubian provinces starts to display its own distinctive features, separate from the rest of the Romance languages, including those of western Balkans (Dalmatian). The Thraco-Roman period of the Romanian language is usually delimited between the 2nd century (or earlier via cultural influence and economic ties) and the 6th or the 7th century. It is divided, in turn, into two periods, with the division falling roughly in the 3rd to 4th century. The Romanian Academy considers the 5th century as the latest time that the differences between Balkan Latin and western Latin could have appeared, and that between the 5th and 8th centuries, the new language, Romanian, switched from Latin speech, to a vernacular Romance idiom, called Română comună.
  • 3.2K
  • 21 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Italic Languages
The Italic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by Italic peoples. They include Latin and its descendants (the Romance languages) as well as a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, South Picene, and possibly Venetic and Sicel. With over 800 million native speakers, the Italic languages are the second most widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after the Indo-Iranian languages. In the past, various definitions of "Italic" have prevailed. This article uses the classification presented by the Linguist List: Italic includes the Latin subgroup (Latin and the Romance languages) as well as the ancient Italic languages (Faliscan, Osco-Umbrian and two unclassified Italic languages, Aequian and Vestinian). Venetic (the language of the ancient Veneti), as revealed by its inscriptions, shared some similarities with the Italic languages and is sometimes classified as Italic. However, since it also shares similarities with other Western Indo-European branches (particularly Celtic languages), some linguists prefer to consider it as an independent Indo-European language. In the extreme view, Italic did not exist, but the different groups descended directly from Indo-European and converged because of geographic contiguity. That view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory. In the intermediate view, the Italic languages are one of the ten or eleven major subgroups of the Indo-European language family and might therefore have had an ancestor, Common Italic or Proto-Italic from which its daughter languages descended. Moreover, there are similarities between major groups, but how the similarities are to be interpreted is one of the major debated issues in the historical linguistics of Indo-European. The linguist Calvert Watkins went so far as to suggest, among the ten major groups, a four-way division of East, West, North and South Indo-European. He considered them to be "dialectical divisions within Proto-Indo-European which go back to a period long before the speakers arrived in their historical areas of attestation". It is not to be considered a nodular grouping; in other words, there was not necessarily any common west Indo-European serving as a node from which the subgroups branched but a hypothesised similarity between the dialects of Proto-Indo-European that developed into the recognised families. Although generally regarded as a single branch that diversified from a Common or Proto-Italic stage, after the Proto-Indo-European period, some authors doubt this common affiliation. All the Italic languages share a number of common isoglosses; thus, all of them are centum languages that do not present palatalization of the Indo-European (palatal) velars /*k, *kʷ, *g, *gʰ, *gʰʷ/. The Romance languages present a later palatalization of Latin phonemes /k, g/, although only before phonemes /ɛ, e, i/.
  • 3.0K
  • 17 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Ural–Altaic Languages
Ural–Altaic, Uralo-Altaic or Uraltaic is a linguistic convergence zone and former language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic (in the narrow sense) languages. It is generally now agreed that even the Altaic languages most likely do not share a common descent: the similarities among Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing. The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone. Indeed, "Ural-Altaic" may be preferable to "Altaic" in this sense. For example, J. Janhunen states that "speaking of 'Altaic' instead of 'Ural-Altaic' is a misconception, for there are no areal or typological features that are specific to 'Altaic' without Uralic." Originally suggested in the 18th century, the genealogical and racial hypotheses remained debated into the mid-20th century, often with disagreements exacerbated by pan-nationalist agendas. It had many proponents in Britain. Since the 1960s, the proposed language family has been widely rejected. A relationship between the Altaic, Indo-European and Uralic families was revived in the context of the Nostratic hypothesis, which was popular for a time, with for example Allan Bomhard treating Uralic, Altaic and Indo-European as coordinate branches. However, Nostratic too is now mostly rejected.
  • 2.8K
  • 31 Oct 2022
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