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Although the first known text by native speakers dates to 1885, the first record of the language is a list of words recorded in 1793 by Alexander MacKenzie. 1885: Motu: grammar by W.G. Lawes: 1886: Guugu Yimidhirr: notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language ...
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth [1] or within the critical period. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one's ethnic group rather than the individual's actual first language. Generally, to state ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Language Family Branch First-language (L1) speakers Second-language (L2) speakers Total speakers (L1+L2) English (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Germanic: 380 million 1.135 billion 1.515 billion Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 941 million 199 million 1.140 billion Hindi (excl ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese.
The first concrete attempt to estimate the date of the hypothetical ancestor language was that of Alfredo Trombetti, [6]: 315 who concluded it was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, or close to the first emergence of Homo sapiens. It is uncertain or disputed whether the earliest members of Homo sapiens had
a Proto-human language, the hypothetical, most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages; the date of attestation in writing . see list of languages by first written accounts. the conservative nature of a given language (low rate of language change, viz. "old" in the sense of "has not changed much for a long time"), see