The Museum of Human Language

You can see (from the sixth column) that the first 16 languages make up half (50%) of the world's population.  But the next 13 make up only 10%.  Thousands of languages are not included in the table.  Now, why do some languages like English, Spanish and French have official status in so many countries?  Mostly because these were the languages of colonial powers which imposed them on their colonies.  When the colonies became independent, sometimes the native languages had died out, sometimes there were so many native languages that it made sense to continue with the colonial language.  Notice that there are languages which are official in no (0) countries.  This is the case with Chinese dialects (sometimes called languages), and many other indigenous languages.

There are six official languages used in the United Nations.   They have official status for historical reasons as well: all but Spanish and Arabic were the languages of the victors in World War II.  It should be mentioned that Russian is spoken in many countries, typically those of the former Soviet Union, but they have not been made official, partly because of resentment on the part of the ex-republics.

What is a dialect?  Is it the speech of someone with an "accent"?  Doesn't every person speak a slightly different language from everyone else anyway?  It is difficult to formalize a definition for a dialect.  Some linguists say a dialect is a language without official status.  This would seem to be true of the Chinese dialects, since speakers of one dialect do not understand those of another.  One formal definition of  a language is a chain of mutually intelligible (understandable) speakers.  Most linguists agree that each person speaks an individual idiolect.  Anything in between a language and an idiolect would be a dialect.

The linguistic situation in Europe may be instructive.   Many of the Romance languages are familiar to us: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian.   They are all descendants of Latin.  But people in different regions of each of theses countries speak somewhat differently, and in some cases could not understand each other if they spoke "in dialect".  For example, Sicilian is probably further from Northern Italian than Spanish is from Portuguese.   On the other hand, people speaking in Northern Italian dialect can easily talk to people speaking the Southern French dialect.  The political border between France and Italy was not a linguistic border until recently, when people have been giving up their dialects and have started speaking only the standard national language.

Because the political borders in Europe are somewhat arbitrary, it is possible to travel from town to town, starting in Portugal and ending in Sicily without noticing any great change in the local language, and without coming to any border where people living on one side cannot understand people living on the other.   Of course, Sicilians do not understand Portuguese speakers. But according to the above definition of a language, there are only two Romance languages: the Italian-French-Spanish-Portuguese superlanguage and Romanian.  Romanian is separated from Italian by Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, so it's quite different. And it is not intelligible to anyone speaking only the other Romance languages. Perhaps you do not like this definition: what about the written languages of French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with centuries of distinct traditions?  Don't these count anymore?  Well, for many years Catalan has been counted as a dialect of Spanish, even though it has been written and spoken for centuries, and is not understandable to speakers of standard Spanish (Castilian).  And Catalan might just as well have been counted as a dialect of French, since it is more-or-less midway between Spanish and French.   Now what about the similarities between Romanian and the super Romance language?  For an answer, just go to  Languages in Time.

Dialecticians sometimes draw maps with lines showing areas where particular speech features are used.  Wherever these lines overlap, like a cable made of many little wires, we can say we have a dialect boundary.   In other words, people living within the "cable" all speak the same dialect.  If people on one side of the "cable" cannot understand people on the other side, we generally have a language boundary.

When differences between peoples' speech become too great for people to understand one another, one language can become two languages.  But the two languages still have something in common: an ancestor language, the original language that perhaps nobody speaks anymore.  Then the two languages could split again and become four languages.  Perhaps only one splits.  But from this continuing process a whole tree of relationships can grow.

The biggest family (in number of speakers) is Indo-European (Indo-Hittite).  Its major branches are:
 

Indo-Iranian	Languages spoken in India, Pakistan, Iran, etc.
Italic	Latin and its descendents: French, Italian, Spanish, etc.
Germanic	German, Dutch, English, Swedish, etc.
Balto-Slavic	Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, etc.

Nobody know for sure how language change starts.  Does it always start with a small group?  How does a change "catch on"?  We all notice when a new word becomes part of the language; think of words like Internet, duh, etc.  Sometimes we notice when a whole sound changes.  Think of the way some young people pronounce short E: neck sounds almost like knack.  Also, the difference in pronunciation between caught and cot seems to be disappearing throughout the US.  If someday AU sounds like short O  everywhere in the world, then we can say that English has changed.  Otherwise, we can say that only some American dialect or dialects have changed.

Interestingly, when sounds change, they seem to change everywhere we find them.  For example, if you pronounce caught and cot the same, then you certainly pronounce taught and tot the same.  Linguists discovered this phenomenon in the eighteenth century and it has helped them discover the history of languages.

Most Volapük speakers learned Esperanto shortly after it was published in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof as "Lingvo Internacia".   Zamenhof used the pen name "Dr. Esperanto" (one who hopes), and that name caught on for the language.  Esperanto is an a posteriori constructed language, meaning that it borrowed words and grammar from existing languages.  But Esperanto also regularized the irregularities of these languages, and so it could be considered somewhat a priori as well.  For example, in Esperanto, all nouns end in o, all adjectives end in a, and all adverbs end in e.  For more information about Esperanto, visit the Esperanto League for North America or the Universal Esperanto Association.

Definition of a multilingual.