Language - Community Unit School District 95

Our spoken, written, or signed
words and the ways we combine
them to communicate meaning
Facts About Languages
 There are 6,500 languages spoken in the world
 About 2,000 of those have less than 1,000 speakers
 What languages have the most number of native speakers?
 Mandarin
 Spanish
 English
 English has the most number of speakers
 Dead language: Still known and used in special contexts, but not as
ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication
 Latin
 Hieroglyphics
 Extinct Language: No longer has any speakers
 Endangered Language: At risk of failing out of use
Why Do Languages Become Extinct?
Populations in physical danger
 Natural disasters, famine, disease
 War/Genocide
Prevention or Discouragement of using
Language:
 Political repression
 Cultural , political, economic marginalization
Extinct Languages
Building Blocks of Language
 Phonemes: Set of basic sounds
 869 in the world; No one language uses them all; 40-45 in English
 Letters like C, B, T + Short and long vowels + sounds like Ch, Sh
 Usually difficult to learn the phonemes of another language
 Morphemes: Smallest unit of sound with meaning




Some morphemes are also phonemes (I, a)
Most morphemes are combinations of two or more phonemes
Prefixes and suffixes (pre, ed, s, etc.)
About 100,000 in the English language
 Combine to make 616, 500 w0rds (in Oxford English Dictionary)
 We are all born with the ability to produce all of the phonemes
of all of the languages of the world!
Differences in Languages
 Rotokas (spoken in Papua New Guinea) has 11
phonemes and 6 consonants
 Hawaiian has 12 phonemes
 !Xu (spoken in Southern Africa) has 141 phonemes and
100 consonants (including clicks)
 Arabic only has 3 vowels (three short, three long)
 Punjabi (India) has 25 vowels
Grammar
 A system of rules in a given language that enables us to
communicate with and understand others
 Semantics: the set of rules we use to derive meaning from
morphemes, words, and even sentences
 Example: adding –ed means that something happened in the past
 Syntax: the rules we use to order words into sentences
 In English adjectives usually come before nouns (red house)
 Language that doesn’t make meaningful sense can be
grammatically correct
 Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz
 Shortest sentence in English language that includes every letter of
the alphabet
Language Development
 How many words will you learn between your
first birthday and high school graduation?
 60,000
 3,500 a year (10 a day)
 Receptive v. Productive Language
 Receptive: ability to comprehend speech
 Productive: ability to produce words
 Receptive matures before productive
Receptive Language
 By 4 months…
 Babies can discriminate speech sounds
 Can also read lips
 By 7 months…
 Can segment spoken wounds into individual words
(hard for us to do when listening to a foreign
language!)
Productive Language
 By 4 months of age…
 Enter into the babbling stage: stage in which the infant
spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the
household language
 Not an imitation of adult speech – includes sounds from other
languages!
 Listener could NOT identify the baby as being Korean,
Ethiopian, French
 Ex: Da-da, na-na, ta-ta and ma-ma
 By 10 months…
 Babbling changes so that the language is identifiable (other
sounds disappear)
 Babies become functionally deaf to speech sounds outside of
their native language (because of lack of exposure)
Productive Language Cont.
 1st Birthday…
 One-Word Stage: stage that lasts from 1-2 during which a child speaks
mostly in single words
 Use sounds to communicate meaning
 Often only one recognizable syllable (family members learn to
understand)
 Inflection may carry meaning - “Doggy!”
 18 Months…
 Two-Word Stage: stage in which a child speaks mostly two-word
statements
 Learning increases from one word a week to one word a day
 Telegraphic Speech: Stage where a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” –
using mostly nouns and verbs (TERMS ACCEPTED. SEND MONEY.)
 If a child gets a late start on learning a particular language, their
language development will still proceed through the same
sequence, although usually at a faster pace
Overgeneralization
Two Views on Language Development
B.F. Skinner
 Believed that language
development can be explained
through learning principles
 Association, imitation,
reinforcement
Noam Chomsky
 Humans are born with an innate
ability to produce language
 Language acquisition device
 We acquire language too quickly for
it to be explained by learning
principles
 Humans learn language similar to
the way that pigeons learn to peck!  All human languages have nouns,
verbs, subjects, and objects
 No matter what language we speak,
we begin to speak in nouns and in
common course
So who is right? Nature v. Nurture?
Is there a critical period for language
development?
 Critical Period: Particular time in
which something needs to be
learned
 Children who have not been
exposed to a language by age 7
gradually lose their ability to
produce any language (including
sign language)
 Brain’s language capacity never fully
develops
 The older we get, the harder it is to
learn a new language
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
 Proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf aka Linguistic
Determinism
 Different languages impose different conceptions of reality
 The Hopi have no past tense. Can they think about the past?
 A skier may have more words for snow . Do they think about snow differently?
 Gender-free words can change our way of thinking
 Contemporary Thoughts on LRH:
 To say that our language determines the way we think is too extreme
 However, you may think differently in different languages
 Example: English has a focus on self-focused emotions; Japanese has
a focus on interpersonal emotions ; Bilingual people may report
having a different sense of self in different languages
 Language and colors: We see colors much the same, but we use
our native language to classify and remember colors
Bi/Multilingualism
More than half the world’s population is
bilingual
Children learning two languages simultaneously
can master approximately the same number of
vocabulary items as children learning a single
language
 Total must be divided between the two languages
 Discrepancies disappear by adulthood

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