By YUEN REN CHAO,

Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and

Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

 

As we have seen, languages can often be grouped together in families the members of which are believed to have descended from a common ancestor. Where evidence is abundant the relationship may be worked out in great detail and the features of the protolanguage may be reconstructed. Very often certain languages are felt to be related on the basis of less extensive genetic evidence, or on the basis of typological evidence. Recently, linguists working on bolder assumptions have placed together in phyla or stocks languages and language families whose mutual relationship cannot be rigorously demonstrated, at least on the basis of available information. This has especially been true of the languages of Africa and the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere. We shall now survey some of the main languages of the world, indicating what families or phyla they are supposed to belong to.

 

(i) The most widespread and most important language family, from the point of the numbers of speakers, is the Indo-European family. Note particularly the fact that, due to historical circumstances, genetic divisions often cut across geographical divisions. For example, the very term Indo-European (called in German Indo-Germanisch) cuts across the geographical conceptions of the Oriental versus the Occidental, English being linguistically closer to Hindi, for example, than Russian is to its neighbour Finnish (of the Finno-Ugrian family). Thanks to the availability of records dating back several millennia and the great variety of the Indo-European languages, the interrelationships among the various languages are well delineated, and the history of their development can be traced in great detail. It is safe to say that the Indo-European family is the best described of all language families known. This family can be subdivided into a number of branches, as briefly outlined below:

 

(a) Indie. The Indie languages are spoken throughout northern India, Pakistan and part of Ceylon. The most important member of this group is Hindi-Urdu (India, Pakistan), with over 62 million native speakers; the literary forms are the literary language of another 30 million, and Bazaar Hindi is used as a lingua franca by several million more. Eastern Hindi, or Kosali, with 30 million speakers, is a separate language. Bengali is spoken in India and Pakistan by 70 million and Assamese, spoken by 6 million in Assam, is very nearly the same language as Bengali. Other important Indo-European languages in and around India are Punjabi (20 million), Marathi (3 million), Gujerati (16 million), and Singhalese in Ceylon (7 million.)

 

(b) The Iranian branch has three important modern representatives : Persian, spoken in Iran by 20 million speakers; Pashtu, used in Afghanistan and Pakistan by over 12 million people; Kurdish, spoken in parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and the U.S.S.R. by perhaps 5-10 million people.

 

(c) The Armenian branch has but one member, Armenian, limited chiefly to the Armenian S.S.R. within the Soviet Union, with over 3 million speakers. Albanian, like Armenian, forms a separate branch; it is spoken in Albania by an estimated 2 million people.

 

(d) The Balto-Slavic branch contains languages spoken over a vast area, from Eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean. The Baltic part of the branch is represented by Lithuanian (3 million speakers), and Latvian (2 million speakers), both spoken in those Baltic states now part of the Soviet Union. The most important member of the Slavic group is Russian, which in the last few centuries has spread from its original European homeland to the vast stretches of Siberia, even though still sparsely settled. At the present time it is spoken by 136 million native speakers, and also known by several additional millions in the U.S.S.R. who use Russian as a second language. Other important Slavic languages are Polish (32 million), Ukrainian (38 million), Serbo-Croatian (12 million), Czech (10 million), Bulgarian (7 million), Byelorussian (38 million), Slovak (4 million), and Slovene (2 million).

 

(e) Greek, with nearly 8 million speakers, is another language which is the only member of a branch. It should be remembered of course that we are now going over the present-day languages of the world and that "Greek" as a well-known school subject means Classical Greek, often with a conventionalized English pronunciation, which is a very different matter from Greek as a modern language. That is in fact why in our enumeration of the languages

of the world there is Greek but no Latin or Sanskrit, since the descendants of Latin are called Romance and those of Sanskrit are called Indie languages.

 

(f) Of the Romance branch of the Indo-European family of languages, Spanish ranks first in the number of speakers, with over 140 million, including those in Spain and, as a result of colonial expansion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in most of the countries in Central and South America. Portuguese, with over 75 million speakers, spread from Portugal to Brazil during the same centuries and is spoken also in Portugal's overseas possessions. French has 42 million native speakers in France, about 10 million in Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland and over 12 million in Africa, Vietnam, etc., who speak it as a second language. Italian is mainly confined to Italy, with 55 million speakers. Rumanian surrounded by Slavic and Hungarian speakers, with consequent abundant borrowing from those languages, is used by some 19 million people in and around Rumania. Catalan, a minority in Spain, is used by about 5 million people.

 

(g) The Celtic branch is rapidly declining. There are remnants of Celtic speakers in Scotland (Gaelic), Wales (Welsh), Eire (Gaelic) and Brittany (Breton). None of these languages is spoken by as many as a million people. So few travellers passing Shannon understand the language of the country, that they usually smile when arrivals and departures of trans-Atlantic planes are announced first in Gaelic before being announced in English.

 

(h) English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. It has been diffused widely over the world and is used extensively as a second language. As a native tongue it is spoken by more than 250 million people and is second only to Mandarin Chinese in the number of speakers.

 

The Germanic languages of course include German, spoken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by some 100 million speakers. To this branch belong also Dutch, spoken in Holland and Belgium (where it is known as Flemish), spoken by 17 million speakers.

 

The Scandinavian languages, spoken by about 18 million inhabitants of Sweden (Swedish), Denmark (Danish), and Norway (Norwegian) are so close to each other that they are mutually intelligible. Once I conducted a seminar on Chinese phonology which happened to consist of three students, one from each of those three countries. They simply carried on discussions, each in his own language, and understood each other without difficulty.

 

(2) Of the relatively few non-Indo-European languages of Europe, there are the relic language of Basque, spoken in southern France and northern Spain and languages of the following family: