LING 1030 Lecture 2: Linguistics 1030 Day 2
Document Summary
Language variation: languages are continuously changing, this leads to the formation of new linguistic varieties, proto-italian can be broken down into venetian, toscan, neapolitan, and sicilian. How many languages are there: ethnologue: 7,099 known living languages, e. g. English, german, zulu, vietnamese: english: cat, german: die katze, zulu: umangoye, what about british and american english? a. american english: apartment, pants, fries b. british english: flat, trousers, chips. Language and linguistics: the distinction between languages and dialects is not directly related to linguistic differences between speech forms. 2: the lack of unambiguous classification criteria might seem like a weakness of the field of linguistics, but it"s not! It"s the nature of language variation as being a continuum. Languages and dialects constitute different forms of human language: linguistics is the study of human language in all of its forms. 5: linguists are concerned with how languages differ and how they are similar!
