1. Definition of language. Classification of languages.

Definition of language
Many definitions of language have been proposed. According to the British linguist
David Crystal, language is a system of conventional spoken, manual, or written
symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and
participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language
include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression,
and emotional release (David Crystal, Robert Henry Robins).

Henry Sweet, an English phonetician and language scholar, stated: “Language is the
expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are
combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.”
The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following
definition: “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a
social group cooperates.”
A number of considerations enter into a proper understanding of language as a subject:

Every physiologically and mentally typical person acquires in childhood the ability to
make use, as both sender and receiver, of a system of communication that comprises a
circumscribed set of symbols (e.g., sounds, gestures, or written or typed
characters). In spoken language, this symbol set consists of noises resulting from
movements of certain organs within the throat and mouth. In signed languages, these
symbols may be hand or body movements, gestures, or facial expressions. By means of
these symbols, people are able to impart information, to express feelings and emotions,
to influence the activities of others, and to comport themselves with varying degrees of
friendliness or hostility toward persons who make use of substantially the same set of
symbols.
Different systems of communication constitute different languages; the degree of
difference needed to establish a different language cannot be stated exactly. Generally,
systems of communication are recognized as different languages if they cannot be
understood without specific learning by both parties, though the precise limits of mutual
intelligibility are hard to draw and belong on a scale rather than on either side of a
definite dividing line. Substantially different systems of communication that may impede
but do not prevent mutual comprehension are called dialects of a language. In order to
describe in detail the actual different language patterns of individuals, the term idiolect,
meaning the habits of expression of a single person, has been coined.
Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. Other members of
the animal kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other
means, but the most important single feature characterizing human language (that is,
every individual language), against every known mode of animal communication, is
its infinite productivity and creativity. Human beings are unrestricted in what they can
communicate. Animal communication systems are by contrast very tightly circumscribed
in what may be communicated.
In most accounts, the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in the
sense of transmission of information from one person to
another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies have drawn attention to
a range of other functions for language. Among these is the use of language to express
a national or local identity (a common source of conflict in situations of multiethnicity
around the world, such as in Belgium, India, and Quebec). Also important are the “ludic”
(playful) function of language—encountered in such phenomena as puns, riddles,
and crossword puzzles—and the range of functions seen in imaginative or
symbolic contexts, such as poetry, drama, and religious expression.
Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood
only if it is considered in relation to society.
The science of language is known as linguistics. It includes what are generally
distinguished as descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a
highly technical subject; it embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major
divisions as phonetics, grammar (including syntax and morphology), semantics,
and pragmatics, dealing in detail with these various aspects of language.

Language classification
There are two kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics: genetic (or
genealogical) and typological. The purpose of genetic classification is to group
languages into families according to their degree of diachronic relatedness. For
example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies as Germanic or Celtic are
recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian,
Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on the other.
So far, most of the languages of the world have been grouped only tentatively into
families, and many of the classificatory schemes that have been proposed will no doubt
be radically revised as further progress is made.
A typological classification groups languages into types according to their structural
characteristics. The most famous typological classification is probably that of isolating,
agglutinating, and inflecting (or fusional) languages, which was frequently invoked in the
19th century in support of an evolutionary theory of language development. Roughly
speaking, an isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically
unanalyzable (i.e., in which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and,
even more strikingly, Vietnamese are highly isolating. An agglutinating language (e.g.,
Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented into morphs, each of which
represents a single grammatical category. An inflecting language is one in which there
is no one-to-one correspondence between particular word segments and particular
grammatical categories. The older Indo-European languages tend to be inflecting in this
sense. For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of categories
“singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but one part of the suffix
cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -isis only one of many
suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of
“singular” and “genitive.”
There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped
typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory
from languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of
consonants to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels,
languages with a fixed word order from languages with a free word order, prefixing
languages from suffixing languages, and so on. The problem lies in deciding what
significance should be attached to particular typological characteristics. Although there
is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages to be typologically
similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic relationship.
Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with
cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development.
 2. Indo-European family of languages.
Indo-European is a family of languages (including most of the languages spoken in
Europe, India, and Iran) descended from a common tongue spoken in the third
millennium B.C. by an agricultural people originating in southeastern Europe.

Branches of Indo-European (IE) include Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit and the Iranian

languages), Greek, Italic (Latin and related languages), Celtic, Germanic (which
includes English), Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Anatolian, and Tocharian.

The theory that languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, Gothic, and Persian
had a common ancestor was proposed by Sir William Jones in an address to the
Asiatick Society on Feb. 2, 1786.

The reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages is known as the

Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).

The chief reason for grouping the Indo-European languages together is that they share
a number of items of basic vocabulary, including grammatical affixes, whose shapes in
the different languages can be related to one another by statable phonetic rules.
Especially important are the shared patterns of alternation of sounds. Thus, the
agreement of Sanskrit ás-ti, Latin es-t, and Gothic is-t, all meaning ‘is,’ is greatly
strengthened by the identical reduction of the root to s- in the plural in all three
languages: Sanskrit s-ánti, Latin s-unt, Gothic s-ind ‘they are.’ Agreements in pure
structure, totally divorced from phonetic substance, are, at best, of dubious value in
proving membership in the Indo-European family.

Regarding the number of its speakers, Indo-European is the largest linguistic family
today. Its name suggests that some of its members are Asiatic and some European. In
fact, the Indo-European family includes the vast majority of European languages and
some Asiatic ones. In the last centuries, they have spread to the five continents and are
now spoken by half of the population of the planet.

There are more than 100 languages in the family and they show different degrees of
relatedness that allows them to be classified in a dozen European and Asiatic branches:

a)Asiatic

•Anatolian: all of its members are extinct now but in former times were spoken in the
Anatolian peninsula (modern Turkey). They included Hittite, Luvian and Palaic, and their
descendants Lycian, Lydian and Carian.

•Armenian: is represented only by Armenian.

•Iranian: includes Modern Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Baluchi and several extinct
languages of Iran and Central Asia.
•Indo-Aryan: the many languages of South Asia including Sanskrit and its modern
descendants like Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi and others.

•Tocharian: comprises only two languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B, both extinct,
recorded in Buddhist documents unearthed in some city-oases of the Silk Road in
Xinjiang, China.

b) European

•Germanic: German, Yiddish, English, Dutch, Frisian and the Scandinavian languages
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese.

•Italic: Latin and its descendants, including Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Provençal,
French, Italian and Romanian.

•Baltic: Latvian and Lithuanian, besides the extinct Prussian.

•Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croat among others.

•Celtic: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton as well as several extinct continental
tongues.

•Hellenic: Greek, ancient and modern.

•Albanian: represented only by the Albanian language.

Major Languages and Speakers

Indo-European languages are spoken by more than 3 billion people. The largest among
them are (in millions of native speakers):

If you’ll need more details:

SHARED FEATURES

✦ Phonology

-Consonants. Reconstruction of the phonology of Proto-Indo-European is difficult due to

the many changes that the languages of the family have experienced and because of
the frequent impossibility of distinguishing between archaisms and innovations.

The most important topic concerns the reconstruction of the stops (consonants
produced by a brief interruption of the airflow). Besides the stops, there were the
fricative s (produced by air-friction), three laryngeals (h1, h2, h3), two nasals (m, n), two
liquids (r, l) and two semi-vowels (y, w).

-Vowels. The protolanguage had five vowels, short and long.

-Vowel gradation. In the more ancient languages of the family, one mechanism to
indicate the relation of a verb or a noun with other words in a sentence consisted in
changing the vowel of the root, a process known as vowel gradation or ablaut. Another
mechanism, which became predominant, was to add different suffixes to an invariable
root, the process we call inflection. Remnants of vowel gradation subsist in the majority
of modern Indo-European languages. There are two types of vowel gradation:
quantitative and qualitative. The first one consists in the strengthening or weakening of
a basic vowel. For example, e changes into strong ai or it is reduced to weak i. The
second one implies a change in the quality or “color” of a vowel. For example, e
changes into o or is elided.

-Accent. Apparently, in Proto-Indo-European there was a musical accent in which a rise

in pitch (sound frequency) highlighted a syllable of the word. This kind of accent served
to mark grammatical functions.

✦ Morphology

Nominal

-Indo-European languages exhibit a great morphological diversity at the nominal and

verbal levels.

-Thus, Proto-Indo-European had eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative,

instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive and locative, distinguishing three numbers
(singular, dual, plural) and three genders (masculine, neuter, feminine). None of the
languages of the family, with the single exception of Sanskrit, preserves this complex
system, though Old Church Slavonic and Ancient Armenian had seven cases, Latin had
six, Ancient Greek five and Hittite four. Several modern Slavic and Baltic languages
have six or seven cases, modern Armenian has five and German four.

-Adjectives agree with their nouns in case, gender and number being inflected in the
same way as nouns. Pronouns are similarly inflected but, frequently, have some suffix
markers of their own. In many modern languages the case system has been
considerably simplified or has completely collapsed.

Verbal

-The verbal system was also complex in most ancient languages, and remains so in
many modern ones. Besides having diverse tenses, they indicated various moods,
aspects and voices.

-Thus, four moods were frequently marked: indicative (expressing a fact), optative
(suggesting possibility, wish or ability), subjunctive (doubt, probability of occurrence in
the future), imperative (command).

-Generally, there were two voices: active, and middle (reflexive) or passive. Ancient
Greek and Sanskrit, exceptionally, had three voices (active, middle, passive).

-More than temporal relations, the Indo-European verb marked aspect. The imperfective
aspect denoted an incomplete, continuous or habitual action; the perfective aspect a
simple, indefinite, completed action; the perfect aspect a completed action whose
results perdure.

✦ Syntax

-Word order in many ancient Indo-European languages (Hittite, Sanskrit, Latin,

Tocharian) was predominantly Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). However, as they were
heavily inflected, word order was relatively free since syntactical relations were
determined mainly by case. -In modern Indo-European languages word order is quite
variable. Some branches, such as Iranian and Indo-Aryan, have retained the SOV order.
Other branches (Italic, Germanic, Greek) have switched to a predominantly Subject-
Verb-Object (SVO) order. Exceptionally, Celtic languages are strictly VSO.

-In ancient SOV languages, genitives and attributive adjectives usually precede their
nouns, relative clauses precede main ones, and postpositions are used. In contrast,
SVO languages employ mainly prepositions, and adjectives tend to follow their nouns
but there are many exceptions (that some scholars interpret as a relic of the ancient
order).

-The capacity to form compound words provided an additional means of expression,

concise and elegant, in which ambiguity played a no minor role since syntactical
relations between the members of the compound were not explicit. Most compounds
were nominal including nouns and/or adjectives, sometimes pronouns as well. Most
compounds had only two words or, at most three, but in Classical Sanskrit longer and
frequent compounds became the norm. Several modern languages have retained this
compound-forming ability while in others it has been lost.

Lexicon

One of the major criteria to determine affiliation between languages is a shared

vocabulary. The words for numerals are quite resistant to change and tend to be well
preserved as the following table illustrates:
 3. Germanic languages
Germanic languages - branch of the Indo-European language family. Scholars often
divide the Germanic languages into three groups: West Germanic, including English,
German, and Netherlandic (Dutch); North Germanic, including Danish, Swedish,
Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese; and East Germanic, now extinct, comprising only
Gothic and the languages of the Vandals, Burgundians, and a few other tribes.

In numbers of native speakers, English, with 450 million, clearly ranks third among the
languages of the world (after Mandarin and Spanish); German, with some 98 million,
probably ranks 10th (after Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese).
To these figures may be added those for persons with another native language who
have learned one of the Germanic languages for commercial, scientific, literary, or other
purposes. English is unquestionably the world’s most widely used second language.

The earliest historical evidence for Germanic is provided by isolated words and names
recorded by Latin authors beginning in the 1st century BCE. From approximately 200 ce
there are inscriptions carved in the 24-letter runic alphabet. The earliest extensive
Germanic text is the (incomplete) Gothic Bible, translated about 350 ce by the Visigothic
bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila) and written in a 27-letter alphabet of the translator’s own design.
Later versions of the runic alphabet were used sparingly in England and Germany but
more widely in Scandinavia—in the latter area down to early modern times. All
extensive later Germanic texts, however, use adaptations of the Latin alphabet.

The Germanic languages are related in the sense that they can be shown to be different
historical developments of a single earlier parent language. Although for some language
families there are written records of the parent language (e.g., for the Romance
languages, which are variant developments of Latin), in the case of Germanic no written
records of the parent language exist. Much of its structure, however, can be deduced by
the comparative method of reconstruction.For example, a comparison of Runic -gastiz,
Gothic gasts, Old Norse gestr, Old English giest, Old Frisian iest, and Old Saxon and
Old High German gast ‘guest’ leads to the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic *ǥastiz.
Similarly, a comparison of Runic horna, Gothic haurn, and Old Norse, Old English, Old
Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German horn ‘horn’ leads scholars to reconstruct the
Proto-Germanic form *hornan.

By pushing the comparative method still farther back, it can be shown that Germanic is
related to a number of other languages, notably Celtic, Italic, Greek, Baltic, Slavic,
Iranian, and Indo-Aryan (Indic). All these language groups are subsequent
developments of a still earlier parent language for which there are, again, no written
records but which can be reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European.

The special characteristics of the Germanic languages that distinguish them from other
Indo-European languages result from numerous phonological and grammatical changes.

More details if you need them:

Phonology
Consonants

Proto-Indo-European had 12 stop consonants: *p, *t, *k, *kw; *b, *d, *g, *gw; *bh, *dh,
*gh, and *gwh; and one sibilant, *s. By a change known as the Germanic consonant
shift (or Grimm’s law), the 12 stops changed in Germanic to voiceless fricatives,
voiceless stops, and voiced fricatives. E.g. Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, and *kw, as
in Latin piscis, tenuis, centum, and quod, became Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *x, and *xw, as
in English fish, thin, hund(red), and what. Proto-Germanic *x and *xw early became *h
and *hw in some positions, giving the alternations of *h∼x and *hw∼xw.

In addition to these general changes, there were two special ones. (1) Proto-Indo-
European *p, *t, and *k remained voiceless stops when preceded by *s or another stop;
(2) By a change known as Verner’s law early Germanic voiceless *f, *þ, *x, *xw, and *s
(from Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, *kw, and *s) were voiced to *ƀ, *ð, *ǥ, *ǥw, and *z,
respectively, when they followed an unaccented syllable, and the first four of these
thereby merged with the already existing *ƀ, *ð, *ǥ, and *ǥw (from Proto-Indo-European
*bh, *dh, *gh, and *gwh). Thus, Proto-Indo-European *bhrātēr became Proto-Germanic
*brōþēr (with þ after an accented syllable) and Old English brōþor ‘brother’; but by
Verner’s law Proto-Indo-European *mātēr became Proto-Germanic *mōðēr (with ð after
an unaccented syllable) and Old English mōdor ‘mother.’

Vowels

In addition to the above consonants (12 stops and the sibilant s), Proto-Indo-European
also had vowels and resonants. The vowel of any given root was not necessarily fixed
but varied in an alternation called ablaut.

This Proto-Indo-European system of vowels contrasting with resonants was reshaped in

Germanic by a number of changes. Syllabic *i, *u, *ṃ, *ṇ, *ḷ, and *ṛ became in Proto-
Germanic the vowels *i and *u and the sequences *um, *un, *ul, and *ur, respectively;
nonsyllabic *m, *n, *l, and *r developed into the nasals and liquids *m, *n, *l, and *r,
respectively; nonsyllabic *i and *u before vowels resulted in the semivowels *j (also
symbolized as *y) and *w, though after vowels they continued to form diphthongs (*ei,
*ai, *oi; *eu, *au, *ou).

Accent

Proto-Indo-European had a variable pitch accent that could fall on any syllable of a word,
but in late Proto-Germanic, two changes occurred: first, the quality of the accent
changed, such that articulatory energy was increasingly focused on the accented
syllable; second, the position of the accent was regularized on the initial (root) syllable.
These changes had far-reaching effects on the subsequent development of Germanic,
for nonaccented syllables became subject to reduction and even total loss; thus, Proto-
Germanic *kuningaz but German König, Danish konge, English king. Reduction of
unstressed vowels was often associated with the mutation or “umlaut” of preceding
accented vowels. In some instances grammatical information that had been carried by
suffixes came instead to be marked by alternations of root vowels—e.g., *fōt/*fōti but
English foot/feet, German Fuss/Füsse.
Grammar

Declensions

Proto-Germanic kept the Proto-Indo-European system of three genders (masculine,

feminine, neuter) and three numbers (singular, dual, plural), though the dual was
becoming obsolete. It reduced the Proto-Indo-European system of eight cases to six:
nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, and vocative, though the last two
were becoming obsolete.

Conjugations

The Proto-Indo-European verb seems to have had five moods (indicative, imperative,
subjunctive, injunctive, and optative), two voices (active and mediopassive), three
persons (first, second, and third), three numbers (singular, dual, and plural), and several
verbal nouns (infinitives) and adjectives (participles). In Germanic these were reduced
to indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods; a full active voice plus passive found
only in Gothic; three persons; full singular and plural forms and dual forms found only in
Gothic; and one infinitive (present) and two participles (present and past).

Many Proto-Germanic strong verbs showed a consonant alternation between *f and *ƀ,
*þ and *ð, *x and *ǥ, and *s and *z that was the result, through Verner’s law, of the
alternating position of the Proto-Indo-European accent. In this particular word, English
has generalized the *s (now z): ‘freeze,’ ‘froze,’ ‘frozen.’ German has generalized the *z
(now r): frieren, fror, gefroren. And Netherlandic still shows the alternation: vriezen,
vroor, gevroren. English has kept the alternation in only one verb: singular was, plural
were. Traces of it still survive, however, in a few now isolated forms: seethe (Proto-
Germanic *þ) and its old past participle sodden (Proto-Germanic *ð); lose (Proto-
Germanic *s) and its old past participle (for)lorn (Proto-Germanic *z).

The Emergence Of Germanic Languages

Like every language spoken over a considerable geographic area, Proto-Germanic

presumably consisted of a number of geographic varieties or dialects that over time
developed in different ways into the different early and modern Germanic languages.
Late-19th-century scholars used a family tree diagram to show this splitting into dialects
and the relationships among the dialects: