Language

Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any example of such a system of complex communication. The scientific study of language is called linguistics. It is impossible to know precisely how many languages there are in the world, and the number depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. However, estimates vary between around 6,000 and 7,000 languages in number. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual or tactile stimuli, for example in graphic writing, braille, or whistling. This is because human language is modality-independent. When used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules.

Human language is unique among the lifeforms of Earth because its complex structure affords a much wider range of possible expressions and uses than any known system of animal communication, all of which are generally closed systems, with limited functions and mostly genetically rather than socially transmitted. In contrast to non-human communication forms, human language has the properties of productivity, recursivity, and displacement. Human language is also the only system to rely mostly on social convention and learning. Language is thought to have originated when early hominins first started cooperating, gradually changing their primate communication systems as they acquired the ability to form a theory of other minds and shared intentionality.

This development is thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently when they are around three years old. The use of language is deeply entrenched in human culture. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language also has many social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as for social grooming and entertainment.

All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs with particular meanings. Oral and sign languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances. Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had for the later stages to have occurred. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The languages that are most spoken in the world today belong to the Indo-European family, which includes languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Hindi; the Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and many others; Semitic languages, which include Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew; and the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, Zulu, Shona and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa. The general consensus is that between 50 to 90% of languages spoken today will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.

Definitions
The English word "language" derives ultimately from Indo-European  "tongue, speech, language" through Latin lingua, "language, tongue", and Old French langage "language". The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as those used for computer programming. A language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article is specifically about the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.

As an object of linguistic study "language" has two primary meanings: language as an abstract concept, and "a language" (a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French"). The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction, using the French word langage for language as a concept, and langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.

When speaking of language as a general concept, some different definitions can be used that stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory.

Mental faculty, organ or instinct
One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans and the biological basis of the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. The view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even spontaneously develop in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language, for example in the case of creole languages, and the case of spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view which can be seen as a view of language going back to Kant and Descartes often understands language to be largely innate, for example as in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar or American philosopher Jerry Fodor’s extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied by studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.

Formal symbolic system
Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses the fact that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for most approaches to language today.

Some proponents of this view of language have advocated a formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then formulating a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as a particular set of sentences that can be generated from a particular set of rules. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind, and to constitute the essence of what language is. Formal definitions of language is commonly used in formal logic, and in formal theories of grammar and in applied computational linguistics.

Tool for communication
Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to cooperate. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understands the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve communicative needs of its users.

This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive and interactional frameworks, as well as in socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as a dynamic phenomenon, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language these views are often associated with Wittgenstein’s later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as Paul Grice, John Searle and J. L. Austin.

What makes human language unique
Human language is unique in comparison to other forms of communication, such as those used by non-human animals. Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or non-human apes are closed systems that consist of a closed number of possible things that can be expressed.

In contrast human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce an infinite set of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This we can do because human language is based on a dual code, where a finite number of meaningless elements (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form units of meaning (words and sentences). Furthermore the symbols and grammatical rules of any particular language are largely arbitrary, meaning that the system can only be acquired through social interaction. The known systems of communication used by animals, on the other hand, can only express a finite number of utterances that are mostly genetically transmitted.

Several species of animals have proven able to acquire forms of communication through social learning, such as the Bonobo Kanzi who learned to express himself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as is generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.

Human languages also differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories such as noun and verb, or present and past, to express exceedingly complex meanings. Human language is also unique in having the property of recursivity; this is the way in which, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in " the chimpanzee]'s lips ") or a clause to contain a clause (as in " [I see [the dog is running]] "). Human language is also the only known natural communication system that is modality independent, meaning that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several - for example spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality and braille writing uses the tactile modality.

With regards to the meaning that it may convey and the cognitive operations that it builds on, human language is also unique in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events, as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.

Origin
Theories about the origin of language can be divided according to their basic assumptions. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one can not imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared fairly suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, some theories see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, while others see it as a system that is largely cultural, that is learned through social interaction.

Currently the only prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins is linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky. Chomsky proposes that 'some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain'. While cautioning against taking this story too literally, Chomsky insists that 'it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language'.

Continuity-based theories are currently held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, for example psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication, either primate gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view today is archaeologist Steven Mithen.

Because the emergence of language is located in the early prehistory of man, the relevant developments have left no direct historical traces and no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Alternatively, early human fossils can be inspected to look for traces of physical adaptation to language use or for traces of pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour.

It is mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general, but scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago), while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago) and the development of language proper with Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.

The study of language
The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago. Today linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects relating to language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above.

Sub-disciplines
The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages; theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language, based on data from the various extant human languages; sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description; neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain, and allows the experimental testing of theories; computational linguistics builds on thoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language, or at testing linguistic hypotheses; and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method.

Early history
The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.

In the 17th century AD the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them.

By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).

Contemporary linguistics
In the 1960s Noam Chomsky formulated the generative theory of language. According to this theory the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that are universal for all humans and which underlies the grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar; for Chomsky, describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. Thus he considered that the grammars of individual languages are only of importance to linguistics insofar as they allow us to deduce the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated.

In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out. The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular language, which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language.

Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech
Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is still on a fairly basic level, and the only gene that has been positively implied in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.

The brain and language
The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity: It controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics.

Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way it was neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing: Wernicke's area located in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop Receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The other area is Broca's area located in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know "what they want to say, they just cannot get it out." They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in Broca's aphasia include problems with fluency, articulation, word-finding, word repetition, and producing and comprehending complex grammatical sentences, both orally and in writing. They also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both Broca's and Wenicke's aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with Broca's aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with Wernicke's aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others' signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, and not to the physiology used for speech production.

With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also adopted non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.

Anatomy of speech
Spoken language relies on our physical ability to produce sound, which is a longitudinal wave propagated through the air at a frequency capable of vibrating the human ear drum. This ability depends on the physiology of the human speech organs. These organs consist of the lungs, the voice box (larynx) and the upper vocal tract - the throat, the mouth and the nose. By controlling the different parts of the speech apparatus the airstream can be manipulated to produce different speech sounds.

The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, and which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between words. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and they can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre and prosody or intonation all of which may have effects across multiple segments.

Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave (See illustration of Spectrogram of the formant structures of three English vowels). Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.

Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity. Vowels are called close when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel (English "ee"), or open when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel  (English "ah"). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth the quality changes, creating vowels such as (English "oo"). And the quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between (unrounded front vowel such as English "ee") and   (rounded front vowel such as German "ü").

Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonants sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed - commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation - the kind of friction - whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called occlusive or stop, or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by the airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English in bus (unvoiced sibilant) from  in buzz (voiced sibilant).

Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called nasals or nasalized sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth: such as the l-sounds (called laterals, because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called rhotics) that are characterized by how the tongue is positioned relative to the air stream.

By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world's languages whereas others are much more common in certain language families, or language areas, or even specific to a single language.

Structure
When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed or written, and they can be combined into complex signs such as words and phrases. When used in communication a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it.

Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations.

The rules under which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases and texts is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.

Semantics
Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example in sounds, images or gestures, and they come to be related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.

Thus languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning—the English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words - often semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories.

All languages contain the semantic structure of predication— a structure that predicates a property, state or action. Traditionally semantics has been understood as the study of how speakers and interpreters assign truth values to statements, so that meaning is understood as the process by which a predicate can be said to be true or false about an entity, e.g. " [x [is y]]" or "[x [does y]] ." Recently, this model of semantics has been complemented with more dynamic models of meaning that incorporate shared knowledge about the context in which a sign is interpreted into the production of meaning. Such models of meaning are explored in the field of pragmatics.

Sounds and Symbols
Depending on modality language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages) or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology. The study of how humans produce and perceive vocal sounds is called phonetics. In spoken language, meaning is produced when sounds become part of a system in which some sounds can contribute to expressing meaning and others do not. In any given language only a limited number of the many distinct sounds that can be created by the human vocal apparatus contribute to constructing meaning.

Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English for example the words /bat/ and /pat/  form a minimal pair in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/ differentiates the two words as having different meanings. But each language contrasts sounds in different ways: for example in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants the sounds [p] and [b] would be considered a single phoneme and consequently the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants as many other languages do: the unaspirated /p/ in /spin/ and the aspirated /p/ in /pin/  are considered as merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words  "crouch" and  "eight" (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).

All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables. As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments they are called suprasegmental. Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes. In sign languages the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language.

Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts each sign represents an entire word, and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.

Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others such as the ancient Maya script can be written in either direction and relies on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading.

In order to represent the sounds of the world's languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.

Grammar
Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called morphemes, within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called words, and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The rules obtaining for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.

Grammatical categories
Grammar can be described as a system of categories, and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. Languages differ widely in whether categories are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.

Word classes
Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denote things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denote actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song," are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "run" and "sing," are called verbs. An other common category is the adjective, words that describe properties or qualities of nouns such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open", if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed", if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since infinite numbers of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix "noun-like"). In other languages such as Korean the situation is the opposite and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.

The word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs," the predicate is "runs," because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally." Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John." A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions that serve to join two sentences and articles that introduces a noun, interjections such as "agh!" or "wow!", or ideophones that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals, that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:
 * san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" — three students

While for trees, it would be:
 * san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" — three trees

Morphology
In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words, and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed".

Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: prefixes precede the root, suffixes follow the root and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example the English word "run" which in the past tense is "ran". This process is called ablaut. Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation which creates a new word from an existing one. In English the verb "sing" has the inflectional forms "singing" and "sung" which are both verbs, and the derivational form "singer" which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix "-er".

Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example Chinese, there are no morphological processes and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example in Latin the word bonus "good" consists of the root bon- meaning "good" and the suffix -us which means masculine gender, singular number and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite type of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example the word evlerinizden "from your houses" consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.

Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called agreement. For example, in many Indo-European languages adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus "good" is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender and singular. In many polysynthetic languages verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu "you saw me", the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English "do") agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the -zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as "see you-did-me"

Syntax


Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. It is the syntactical rules of a language that determine why a sentence in English such as "I love you" is meaningful but "*love you I" is not : syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning. For example, in English the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb. But in Latin both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was reprimanding the slaves", because servos "slaves" is in the accusative case showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence and dominus "master" is in the nominative case showing that he is the subject.

Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions which exists in many languages. This rule is the reason that in English, when the phrase "John is talking to Lucy" is turned into a question it becomes "Who is John talking to?" and not "John is talking to who?". The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on "who", thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels. To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analysed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase; and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.

The reason sentences can be seen as composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations are carried out. For example "the cat" is one phrase and "on the mat" is another because they would be treated as single units if we decided to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: "[And] on the mat, the cat sat". There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.

Typology: universals and diversity
Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate. For example languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English the basic order is SVO "The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)", whereas for example the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be "d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy" (Snake Man Bit), SOV. Word order type is relevant as a typological parameters because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions of postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals. For example most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.

Through the study of various types of word order it has been discovered that not all languages group the relations between actors and actions as English do into Subject, Object and Verb - this type is called the nominative-accusative type. Some languages called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish between Agents and Patients. In English transitive clauses, both the subject of intransitive sentences ("I run") and transitive sentences ("I love you") are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. In ergative languages the single participant in an intransitive sentence such as I run is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence - giving the equivalent of "me run" and "you love me", only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun I be used. In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.

The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages&mdash;language universals&mdash;or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve.

Social contexts of use and transmission
While all humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers, and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate, and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes. Due to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.

However, languages differ from a biological organisms in that they readily incorporate elements from other languages through the process of diffusion, as speakers of different languages come into contact. Humans also frequently speak more than one language, acquiring their first language or languages as children, or learning new languages as they grow up. Because of the increased language contact in the globalizing world many small languages are becoming endangered as their speakers shift to other languages that afford the possibility to participate in larger and more influential speech communities.

Usage and meaning
The semantic study of meaning assumes that meaning is located in a relation between signs and meanings that are firmly established through social convention. But semantics does not study the way in which social conventions are made and affect language. However, when studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings depending on the social context of use. And signs also change their meaning over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions change depending on context is called pragmatics. Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example in all languages linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects. For example the act of 'naming', which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of 'pronouncing someone man and wife' which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can of course also be carried out through writing or hand signing.

The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks "can you reach the salt?", that is in fact not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken, these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for the ways in which certain ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations, and how to understand utterances in relation to their context, vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.

Language acquisition
All healthy, normally-developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them – whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring sign or oral languages. This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art."

First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally-developing infants. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, she or he will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months begin to produce telegraphic speech, short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.

Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows.

Language and culture
Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speak them. Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group and difference from others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.

A community's way of using language is a part of the community's culture, just as other shared practices are; it is a way of displaying group identity. Ways of speaking function not only to facilitate communication, but also to identify the social position of the speaker. In many languages there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak. Just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example in the Australian language Dyirbal a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother in-law.

Linguists use the term "varieties" to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.

Languages do not differ only in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate systems of "social deixis", systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in several languages of east Asia, such as Thai, Burmese and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.

Writing, literacy and technology
Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.

The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across distances that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles and register in written and spoken language, and in some communities writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also have effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education.

The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

Language change
All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.

Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, or of the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there previously was none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm's law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant * became /b/ in the Germanic languages, and the previous * in turn became /p/ and the previous * became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces whereas Germanic languages like English have father and fish.

Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation, this is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words, as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma'am.

Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happen when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish where word final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ is the morpheme marking the second person subject "you" on verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence "what's your name" is ¿como te llamas? in Standard Spanish, but  in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax. Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example the way the English "going to" construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full fledged future tense (e.g. I'm gonna).

Language change may be motivated by "language internal" factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish auditively or to produce, or because of certain patterns of change that cause certain rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types. Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership of certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure.

Language contact
One important source of language change is contact between different languages and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one, state and one language the most desirable political arrangement monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, so most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.

When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them: the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also larger areas such as South Asia, Europe and South East Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.

Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to learn to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure, the language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages are Tok Pisin the official language of Papua New-Guinea which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen the French based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.

Linguistic diversity
A "living language" is simply one which is in wide use as a primary form of communication by a specific group of living people. The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular on how one defines the distinction between languages and dialects. As of 2009, SIL Ethnologue catalogued 6909 living human languages. The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often include more categories than more conservative classifications. For example the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects, is classified as three distinct languages by the Ethnologue.

The Ethnologue is also sometimes criticized for using cumulative data gathered over many decades, meaning that exact speaker numbers are frequently out of date, and some languages classified as living may have already become extinct. According to the Ethnologue 389 (or nearly 6%) languages have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world’s population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population. To the right is a table of the world's 10 most spoken languages with population estimates from the Ethnologue (2009 figures).

Languages and dialects
There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy". For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Cantonese and Mandarin are for example often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav civil war, Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language with two dialects, but now Croatian and Serbian are considered different languages, and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.

Language families of the World
The world's languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists currently recognize many hundred language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present there are also dozens of language isolates - languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them is Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, P'urhépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan and many others.

The language families of the world that have most speakers are the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi/Urdu. The Indo-European family achieved prevalence first during the Eurasian Migration Period (c. 400-800 AD), and subsequently through the European colonial expansion which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 21% of the world's population and includes many of the languages of East Asia including Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and hundreds of smaller languages.

Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger–Congo languages which includes such languages as Kiswahili, Shona and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.4% of the world's population. A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language and the languages of the Sahara region such as the Berber languages and Hausa.

The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.9% of the world's population and stretches from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania. It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC. and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an level advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Tamil and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), and the Austro-Asiatic (Among them Khmer) and Tai–Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).

The areas of the world where there is greatest linguistic diversity such as the Americas, Papua-New Guinea, West Africa and South-Asia contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world's languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas some of the largest language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas Papua-New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages.

Language endangerment
Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they are currently disappearing at an accelerated rate due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.

The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages and therefore, the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. The total number of languages in the world is not known. Estimates vary depending on many factors. The general consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages currently spoken, and that between 50-90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca such as English or Esperanto, there is a general consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but this belief is contradicted by the facts that many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil Wars, or the genocides of Nazi Germany and Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.

Many projects under way are aimed at preventing or slowing this loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages. Across the world many countries have enacted specific legislation aimed at protecting and stabilizing the language of indigenous speech communities. A minority of linguists have argued that language loss is a natural process that should not be counteracted, and that documenting endangered languages for posterity is sufficient.

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