LINA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Linguistic Typology, Mutual Intelligibility, North Germanic Languages
Document Summary
There are 6909 languages in the 200 countries of the world. Most languages have fewer than 10 000 speakers, nor do they have the protection of a national government. In this case, latin is a dead language. However, the language evolved into french, spanish, italian, etc. which still are spoken today. Bo (an indian language) is truly dead. It did not evolve and there are no native speakers existing. Speakers use them less in favour of languages which appear to yield greater economic/educational opportunities. In the course of 3 generations: parents are monolingual, children are bilingual, grandchildren are monolinguals of the new language. Possible languages is greater than the number of observed languages. So we can observe more dialects, build more accurate models of human language. Goal should be to develop mental grammars where all and only possible languages can be generated.
