Portal:Language/Language of the month
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[edit] /December 2005
Portuguese (Português ) is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Macao Special Administrative Region of China, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Many linguists consider that Portuguese and Galician (the native language of Galicia, Spain) are actually varieties of the same language, but with Galician being strongly influenced by Spanish. It should be noted, however, that the government of Galicia considers Galician to be a separate language. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts of the world, and is the fifth or sixth most-spoken first language in the world. Because Brazil, with 184 million inhabitants, constitutes about 51% of South America's population, Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in South America and it is also one of the key languages in Africa. Learn more...
[edit] /January 2006
Tamil is a Dravidian language related to Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, among others. As one of the few living classical languages, it has an unbroken literary tradition of over two millennia, with the earliest writings having been dated to circa 500 B.C. Tamil, like other Dravidian languages, is agglutinative and the writing is largely phonetic. It is spoken by a majority of people in Tamil Nadu and northern and north-eastern Sri Lanka, while a significant emigrant population lives in Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of the world. It is officially recognised in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and South Africa. Find out more...
[edit] /February 2006
The Gbe languages form a cluster of about 20 related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe, followed by Fon. The Gbe languages belong to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo languages, and break up into five major dialect clusters: Ewe, Fon, Aja, Gen, and Phla-Pherá. In the late 18th century, many speakers of Gbe were enslaved and transported to the New World, causing Gbe languages to play a role in the genesis of several Caribbean creole languages. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann was one of the most prolific contributors to the study of Gbe. The first internal classification of the Gbe languages was published in 1988 by H.B. Capo, followed by a comparative phonology in 1991. The Gbe languages are tonal, isolating languages and the basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Find out more...
[edit] /March 2006
The Laal language is a still-unclassified language spoken by about 300 people in three villages in the Moyen-Chari prefecture of Chad on opposite banks of the Chari River, called Gori, Damtar, and Mailao. It may be a language isolate, in which case it would represent an isolated survival of an earlier language group of central Africa. It is unwritten (except in transcription by linguists). According to SIL-Chad missionary David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespread Baguirmi language. This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977, through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based for the most part on a single speaker, M. Djouam Kadi of Damtar. Find out more...
[edit] /May 2006
Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Gaelic. Written examples are extant from the tenth century A.D. onwards. While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian shares a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of political importance in the twentieth century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations. Find out more...
[edit] /June 2006
Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship. It is the original language of a large section of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra. It was probably the language of Jesus, it is the main language of the Talmud, and it is still spoken today as a first language by numerous small communities. Aramaic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family. Within this diverse family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic subfamily. Aramaic is a part of the Northwest Semitic group of languages, which also includes the Canaanite languages (including Hebrew). Find out more...
[edit] /July 2006
"Vulgar Latin" is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, starting from the second and third century AD, until its direct merging with the early Romance languages in the ninth century. This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been in place in spoken Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier. Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the comparative method can reconstruct the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from classical Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin users were likely to commit, providing insight into how Latin speakers used their language. Finally, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the writer. Find out more...
[edit] /August 2006
Taiwanese is the home language for about 60 percent of the population of Taiwan. Native speakers of Taiwanese are known as Hō-ló. The language, a tonal one with extremely extensive tone sandhi rules, is similar to the speech of the southern part of Fujian in China. There are special literary and art forms in Taiwanese such as Chhit-jī-á, a poetic meter where each verse has 7 syllables; and koa-a-hì, Taiwanese opera. Find out more...
[edit] /September 2006
Nafaanra (sometimes written Nafaara, pronounced [Nafaãra]) is a Senufo language spoken in northwest Ghana, along the border with Côte d'Ivoire, east of Bondouko. It is spoken by approximately 61,000 people (GILLBT 2003). Its speakers call themselves Nafana; others call them Banda or Mfantera. Like other Senufo languages, Nafaanra is a tonal language. It is somewhat of an outlier in the Senufo language group, with the geographically closest relatives, the Southern Senufo Tagwana-Djimini languages, approximately 200 kilometres to the west, on the other side of Comoé National Park. Find out more...
[edit] /October 2006
Irish (Gaeilge), a Goidelic language spoken in Ireland, is constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland and has official recognition in Northern Ireland as well. European Union foreign ministers have unanimously decided to make Irish an official language of the European Union, beginning in 2007. There are approximately 1.6 million Irish speakers. The language is unusual in posessing initial consonant mutations, and a Verb Subject Object word order. Find out more...
[edit] /November 2006
Latvian (latviešu valoda), sometimes referred to as Lettish, is the official state language of the Republic of Latvia. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. Latvian is of the Eastern Baltic sub-group of the Baltic language group in the Indo-European language family. There are three dialects in Latvian: the Livonian dialect, Latgalian language and the Middle dialect. The language is of interest to linguists because it retains many archaic features of the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother language of Old Latin, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and Proto-Germanic. Find out more...
[edit] /December 2006
Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা, IPA: ['baŋla]) is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from Prakrit, Pāli and Sanskrit.
Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. With nearly 200 million native speakers, Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (it is ranked between fourth and seventh[1]). Bengali is the main language spoken in Bangladesh; in India, Bengali is ranked as the second[2] most spoken language. Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-European languages. Find out more...
