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People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.
And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.
Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.
[...] Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.
https://theconversation.com/why-do-human-beings-speak-so-many-languages-75434
Would you people care to speculate as to why there are so many languages ?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jimtheowl on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:40AM (6 children)
People used to live in tribes, and with time relocated for resources.
Isolated dialects evolved differently. Dialects with common sources have more words and structure in common.
There isn't much to speculate about.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:31AM (5 children)
Doesn't explain why one island has 900 "languages."
In fact all the tribes isolated in steep valleys speak a common language, with regional dialects. Western linguists decide it's a different language, simply because they are unfamiliar. Yet the people have no difficulty understanding each other.
With no formal language training, and no written language, famial pet words and village lingo creep into the everyday speech. But the widely known words are still understood.
We put too much stock in Western researchers working on their disertation.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:57AM (2 children)
One excuse is (for political reasons) the Chinese Gov has been pushing Mandarin and preferring to demote the other Chinese languages as dialects of Chinese but science is about truth and consistency.
Written Mandarin and Cantonese on the other hand has high mutual intelligibility (there are differences but basically if a Cantonese speaker has difficulty understanding a Mandarin speaker they can write to each other to communicate assuming both are literate in written Chinese ).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:12AM (1 child)
Virtually all written Chinese in the last century has been written with Mandarin grammar and words. There are written forms of languages like Cantonese that differ substantially from Mandarin, but they're not the norm. And education in China is done in Mandarin. Os, Virtually everybody in China knows some Mandarin, but some folks, particularly the less educated, may not speak enough to be comfortable with it as they mostly speak the local language and use the written language when reading and writing to people from other areas.
Cantonese speakers can mostly understand Mandarin speakers in larger part because there's a huge number of Mandarin speakers there now. If you walk around in any of those southern cities you're just about as likely to hear Mandarin as Cantonese these days from all the internal immigration for the jobs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:05AM
That indicates you have little idea of what you are talking about. You didn't even seem to put in effort to understand the comment you're replying to.
http://shanghaiist.com/2017/04/05/mandarin_speaking.php [shanghaiist.com]
There's a difference between the spoken and written language. As already mentioned they can understand each other via the written language (assuming they can read and write). But spoken Cantonese is quite different from spoken Mandarin. In the past it was probably a clever idea for the various districts to send in the reports to "HQ" - they could mostly keep their spoken language, while the written reports could be understood by the Palace bureaucrats etc. That wouldn't have been the case if they had used a script that was linked to the sounds (e.g. alphabet).
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @06:38AM
And one frojack speaks with two tongues, a "forked tongue", of which I, not a Western Researcher working on my Dissertation, cannot understand. What are you saying, frojack? Are you speaking dialect, or just drunk? Or trying to not be understood? It is all so confusing.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 19 2017, @06:53AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves