Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Monolingualism. Monoglottism (Greek μόνος monos, "alone, solitary", + γλῶττα glotta, "tongue, language") or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. In a different context, "unilingualism" may refer to a language policy which ...
The global language system is the "ingenious pattern of connections between language groups". [1] Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan developed this theory in 2001 in his book Words of the World: The Global Language System and according to him, "the multilingual connections between language groups do not occur haphazardly, but, on the contrary, they constitute a surprisingly strong and efficient ...
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
Multilingualism and globalization. Globalization has had major effects on the spread and ascribed value of multilingualism. Multilingualism is considered the use of more than one language by an individual or community of speakers. [1] Globalization is commonly defined as the international movement toward economic, trade, technological, and ...
A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. [ 1 ] Basque in Europe, Ainu [ 1 ] in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, Tiwi in Australia and Burushaski in Pakistan are all examples of language isolates.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 5 September 2024. Group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor 2005 map of the contemporary distribution of the world's primary language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The ...
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, German, French, Italian, and English. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [ 4 ] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.)
Language contact. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, [1] between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as ...