Some of the topics I will cover in this post are:
What is a language? History of languages The categories, or types, of languages Where do we get our languages from? Ways to learn a language Without getting too technical. For those who want to know more.
That seems like quite a lot, so let’s start with “what is a language?” Well, many people might say that it is what we use to communicate with other people and they would be correct! But there’s more to it than that. It can be broken down into three different parts: grammar (the way words are put together), lexicon (the words themselves), and phonology (how the words sound). Languages are interesting because they’re all unique in their own way – but how did they come about? This question has been debated for decades now. Most linguists believe that at one point all humans spoke one single language – but how did we lose it and become separated by thousands of different dialects? Some linguists believe that each human society created their own new language as they grew larger; others believe when humans began migrating from Africa during the Stone Age 20 thousand years ago (oh my gosh!), some groups left while others stayed; eventually over time these groups became separated by continent or ocean and started speaking differently since there was no longer contact between them. I am learning a language right now, and I am in the beginning stages. It is daunting, but the best way to learn a language is by immersing yourself into it! This can include: listening to music from that country, watching movies/shows from that country, reading books from that country, watching tutorials in another language (these are very helpful if you use subtitles for everything), talking with people who speak a foreign language (and practicing your own!), and of course – studying.
What exactly are the categories of languages? There are at least 6 different types of languages. The first is called “agglutinative”. This category includes Turkish, Korean and Japanese. Languages in this category often have words for colors that are made out of more than one word. For example, in Turkish, the color red is “kız” (pronounced kih-ZAH) and the color blue is “mavi” (pronounced mah-VEE).
Another category is called “fusional”. These languages are ones where words are often joined together, but not always. Spanish and Portuguese fall into this category. Some examples of fusional languages include: Spanish – él va a la casa = he goes to the house; Korean – 한국 사람 = Korean person; Japanese – 飲み 空き瓶 = empty bottle to drink from (no joke!). A third type of language we will discuss is called an agglutinative-isolating language. Isolating means that words stand alone without being combined with other words or morphemes (morphemes are units of meaning). Chinese and Indonesian fall into this category. If you’ve ever watched a movie or show with subtitles in Chinese or Indonesian, you might notice that there isn’t any punctuation used! That’s because most grammar rules can be expressed by adding extra sounds on to the end or beginning of a word rather than through punctuation marks like commas and periods.
Moving on, another category is called an “isolating” language (which is surprising because I just said that Chinese and Indonesian are in the agglutinative-isolating category! But it doesn’t make sense to have two categories with the same name). These languages are also called “analytic”, which means words function on their own and don’t need to be combined with other words to form sentences. Languages like English, Spanish and Russian fall into this category. The last category of languages we will discuss is known as a “fusional” language. One of these might be your native language! This type of language includes French, German and Latin. All three of these languages have what’s known as components called morphemes (see above) that can be added onto a word or stem to change its meaning slightly. For example, in Latin there is a small verb stem ‘am’ that means ‘to love’. There are many different ways you can change the meaning by adding different morphemes: amare = love; amavisti = you [pl.] loved; amaverunt = they [pl.] loved; etc.
I hope you enjoyed this! I didn’t get into the technical side of languages, but feel free to comment if you have any questions. If you’re interested in learning a new language, I suggest starting with Spanish! It’s very friendly and easy to learn. Also, there is a lot of great literature out there in Spanish (and other languages too). Good luck with your studies!
That’s all for now – thank you for reading.
