Linguistic map of the world linguistics. Map of the World's Language Families (Linguistic Map of the World). Most common languages

How many languages ​​are there in the world? It is believed that from 2500 to 7000. Scientists' views on their total number differ due to the lack of a unified approach to what is considered a language and what is a dialect.

How many languages ​​are there in the world?

All languages ​​of the world are divided into families, of which there are 240. The largest and by far the most studied group is considered to be the Indo-European group, which includes the Russian language. Reason for inclusion different languages in one family there is a significant phonetic similarity denoting basic concepts, and similarity of grammatical structure.

There are also isolated languages ​​that cannot be placed into any one family. An example of such an isolated language, “not remembering kinship,” is the Basque dialect “Euskera”.

Most common languages

How many languages ​​are there in modern world which are the most common? These include 10: Chinese (Mandarin), English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French. Mandarin is spoken by over 1 billion people. Each of the other nine of the top ten most common languages ​​is spoken by over 100 million people.

The reason for the popularity of the Chinese language should be considered that it is spoken in China, Singapore, Taiwan; there are large Chinese diasporas in almost all countries South-East Asia and other countries of the world. We must not forget about the fertility of this people.

Native speakers of English were the most active conquerors of overseas lands and discoverers of the Americas. That is why, if we look at the language map of the world, we will see that these two languages ​​dominate territorially. English is the official language in 56 - more than 20 countries. The French, just like the British and Spaniards, also at one time created a powerful empire, which controlled vast territories in North America and Africa. For today French is the first official language in 15 countries of the world.

In the history of European civilization, several languages ​​in the world different times occupied the position of interethnic - lingua franca. During the Roman Empire, Koine, the common Greek language, became the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East. Subsequently, for more than 1000 years, first in the Mediterranean countries and then throughout Catholic Europe, Latin language. In the 18th-19th centuries, French became the means of international communication. Since the end of the twentieth century, the means of interethnic communication throughout the world has become English language, undoubtedly, due to the leading position in the world of the English-speaking superpower - the United States.

Dead languages

In linguistics there is such a thing as a “dead language”. This is one that is no longer spoken, and is known only thanks to written monuments. In some cases, dead languages ​​continue to live because they are used for scientific or religious purposes. How many languages ​​are there in the world? These include Latin, from which the Romance languages ​​subsequently developed; Old Russian, which became the basis for the East Slavic languages, and Ancient Greek. There are also a number of dead languages ​​that are used for scientific and religious purposes - Sanskrit, Coptic, Avestan.

There is one unique case resurrection of the dead language. After the Second World War, when the State of Israel was created, Hebrew, which had not been spoken for 18 centuries, was revived as official language of this country.

Dominant language

In a bilingual environment, one language is dominant. Previously, during the times of empires, the main reason for the dying of local languages ​​was the mass extermination of the local population. Today, a weaker language dies due to socio-economic reasons, not because its speakers are dying out. Ignorance of the dominant language entails the impossibility of obtaining an education, moving up the social ladder, etc. Therefore, in a bilingual family, parents often prefer not to even speak their native endangered language, so as not to create problems for their children in the future. The extinction process is largely influenced by means mass media using the dominant language.
An important question is how many languages ​​there are in the world. But even more important problem- their extinction. Every 2 weeks, one language disappears in the world. According to scientists, by the end of the 21st century, 3.5 thousand of them will disappear.

Constructed languages

An interesting phenomenon in the world of languages ​​is artificial dialects. How many languages ​​of this type are there in the world? There are 16 of them, and the most popular of them is Esperanto, created in 1887 by Ludwig Zamenhof. Zamenhof was originally from Bialystok, a city where Jews, Poles, Germans, and Belarusians lived. The city was very complex. Zamenhof believed that the reason for this was the lack of a common language. The purpose of Esperanto was to spread ideas of peaceful coexistence among people all over the world. Zamenhof published an Esperanto textbook. He translated many masterpieces of world literature into his language and even wrote poetry in Esperanto. Most of the Esperanto vocabulary consists of Romance and Germanic roots, as well as Latin and Greek, which have general scientific significance. About 200,000 articles in Esperanto have been published on Wikipedia.

Now you know how many languages ​​there are in the world, and perhaps you can save the endangered ones by studying them.

There are about 3,000 languages ​​around the world, exact amount No one has yet been able to calculate it. Although, according to available UNESCO data, there are 2,796 languages ​​in the world. Seeing the exact figure, any linguist will smile, not because the exact number of languages ​​in the world was counted, but from what was counted. All over the world there are many mixed languages ​​and languages ​​that are extinct or languages ​​of small tribes that are not officially listed anywhere. In this regard, it is practically impossible to calculate the exact number of languages. But linguists managed to distribute all the languages ​​of the world into groups or families.

Many different languages ​​are similar to each other, for example, a citizen of Russia can communicate with a citizen of Belarus and Ukraine, or vice versa, and everyone will be able to understand each other. Basically, the languages ​​of those peoples whose lands border each other or by the ethnic origin of the countries are similar. As we know, 1000 years ago, in the territory where Belarus, Ukraine and Russia are now located, there were lands Kievan Rus. And the ancestors of the above countries communicated in the same Old Church Slavonic language. Until our time, the borders have changed, and in place of Kievan Rus, three new states grew up: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Map of the distribution of languages ​​of Ukraine

Chinese dialect map

Indigenous languages ​​of South America

Arabic dialects

Dialects of the Russian language

Map of African languages

German dialect map

Map of Finno-Ugric languages

Map of Slavic languages

Map of Indian languages

Families and groups of languages

Currently, linguists distinguish the following families and groups of languages:

- Indian group. This is the most large group in count talking people, as Indian languages ​​are spoken by more than 1 billion people. This group includes the languages ​​of Central and Northern India, as well as Pakistan. You can also include the gypsies who moved to Europe from India in the 5th - 10th centuries into this group. n. e. Of the extinct languages, this group includes the ancient Indian language - Sanskrit. The famous epic poem was written in this language ancient india"Mahabharata"

- Iranian group. The languages ​​of this group are spoken in Iran (Persian) and Afghanistan (Afghan). In this group there is a dead Scythian language.

- Slavic group. This includes a large number of different languages, which are usually further divided into subgroups.

• eastern subgroup; Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian language
• Western subgroup; Polish, Slovak, Czech, Kashubian, Lusatian and Polabian which is a dead language
• southern subgroup; Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic which is also a dead language

- Baltic group. This group speaks Latvian and Lithuanian.

- German group. Almost all languages ​​belong to this group Western Europe; Scandinavian (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic), English, German, Dutch and modern Hebrew language Yiddish. Among all the above languages ​​in this group, English is the most widely spoken and is spoken by more than 400 million people. USA - 215 million, UK 58 million, Canada 33.5 million, Australia - 20 million, Ireland - 4 million, South Africa - 4 million, New Zealand 3.6 million. German is spoken in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Regarding the Yiddish language, we can say that almost all Jews speak it. One of the languages ​​of the Germanic group, Boer, is widespread in South Africa thanks to immigrants from Holland.

- Roman group . French, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese languages. This group also includes Provençal, Sardinian (island of Sardinia), Catalan (Eastern Spain) and Moldavian.

- Celtic group. The languages ​​of this group are spoken in Ireland and on the nearby islands, as well as on the Brittany peninsula of France (Breton language), in Wales (Welsh language). The dead languages ​​of this group include the language of the ancient Gauls, who lived in the territory of modern France.

In addition to the above groups, Greek, Albanian and Armenian languages ​​are separately distinguished, which are classified as Indo-European languages. Also included in this group are such dead languages ​​as Hittite (Asia Minor) and Tocharian (the territory of Central Asia).

Language World Map

A linguistic picture of the world, historically formed in the everyday consciousness of a given linguistic community and reflected in the language as a set of ideas about the world, a certain way of conceptualizing reality. With this complex and cumbersome definition, I want to present several language maps of the world:

Each natural language reflects a certain way of perceiving and organizing the world. The meanings expressed in it form a certain unified system of views, a kind of collective philosophy, which is imposed as mandatory on all speakers of the language. The way of conceptualizing reality inherent in a given language is partly universal, partly nationally specific, so that speakers of different languages ​​can see the world slightly differently, through the prism of their languages. On the other side, language picture world is "naive" in the sense that in many significant respects it differs from the "scientific" picture. At the same time, the naive ideas reflected in the language are by no means primitive: in many cases they are no less complex and interesting than scientific ones.
Participants in the Bab.la project created a world map that shows the main languages ​​of the world, their coverage area, and the number of people using them. This language map shows the most spoken language on each continent, and in the world! With the help of this map, you can clearly see linguistic diversity, and, accordingly, imagine the multidimensional and multifaceted world of human thoughts and philosophies.

Hyperfamily- unification of macro-families, extremely hypothetical.

Macrofamily

Macrofamily- a structural unit in linguistics that includes several families of languages. The unification of several families into one large macrofamily is usually based only on hypotheses, and therefore is perceived ambiguously by many linguists. Therefore, when talking about any macrofamily, for example Nostratic or Sino-Caucasian, one should remember that the term macrofamily in this case means only a possible connection between the language groups included in it.

Some proposed macrofamilies

Borean hyperfamily

- Afroasiatic macrofamily
- Nostratic macrofamily (Indo-European, Altai, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Ural-Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleutian)
- Sino-Caucasian macrofamily (Basque, Dene-Yenisei, North Caucasian, Burushaski, Hurrito-Urartian, Sino-Tibetan, inclusion in this family a whole group of isolates)
- Austric macrofamily (Austroasiatic languages, Austronesian languages, Dongtai languages, Miao-Yao languages)
- Amerindian macrofamily

Niger-Saharan hyperfamily
- Niger-Congo languages
- Nilo-Saharan languages

Khoisan languages

Indo-Pacific languages
- Andamanese languages
- Papuan languages
- Tasmanian languages
- ? Indian isolates: kusunda, nihali

Australian languages ​​(29 families of Australian languages)

Family

Family- the basic level on which all linguistic taxonomy is based. A family is a group of distinctly but widely related languages ​​that have at least 15% matches in the base list (the hundred-word version of the Swadesh list).

The most common language families are:
1. Indo-European languages ​​~ 2.5 billion speakers, including Indo-Aryan languages, Germanic languages ​​and Balto-Slavic languages;
2. Sino-Tibetan languages ​​~ 1.2 billion speakers, including the main one Chinese;
3. Ural-Altaic languages ​​(formation of the superfamily level) ~ 500 million speakers, including the main Turkic languages.

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European family includes Albanian, Armenian and the Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Romance, Illyrian, Greek, Anatolian (Hittite-Luvian), Iranian, Dardic, Indo-Aryan, Nuristan and Tocharian language groups. At the same time, Italic (if Romance is not considered Italic), Illyrian, Anatolian and Tocharian groups are represented only by dead languages.

Indo-European language family. On the left are centum languages, on the right are satem languages. Dead languages ​​are marked in red.

Sino-Tibetan languages

Full composition and classification:

Chinese
Taiwanese language
Cantonese language
Putonghua
Mandarin
Kachin language
Burmese
Mizo
Bodo
Garo
Dungan language
Bai
Dzongkha
Tibetan language
Gandu
Newar language

Friends, in our everyday life we ​​rarely think about the fact that nothing in the world stands still. Unfortunately, most of the trends that take place on planet Earth are negative character: be it deterioration ecological situation, global rapid extinction of flora and fauna, etc.

Judging by the calculations of linguists, the register languages ​​of the world About 6 thousand languages ​​are included, but 90% of them are used by less than one hundred thousand people! 46 languages ​​of the world have only one speaker! As noted CEO UNESCO Koichiro Matsuura, in the next 100 years almost half of the existing languages ​​will die out. Linguists have established that in order for a language to live and develop successfully, it is necessary that at least 1 million people speak it, and there are currently no more than 250 of them in the world.

In this regard, I found a very interesting interactive atlas on the Internet, which is called Map of the world's languages.

This map was created worldwide renowned organization UNESCO in order to draw public attention to the rapidly threatening trend of extinction of the world's languages ​​and to the need to preserve the world's linguistic diversity.

After selecting a country in the world from the “Country or area” list (don’t forget to click on the “Search Languages” button), you will be able to see multi-colored markers that indicate the degree of extinction that threatens a particular language. The languages ​​themselves spoken in a particular region will be listed to the right of the map.

The color of the markers indicates the following:

• white – most children speak this language, but there may be isolation
• yellow – children no longer learn this language as their first language
• orange – only the older generation speaks the language
• red – even grandparents speak the language partially and rarely
• black – there are no native speakers left

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the UNESCO map of the world's languages ​​does not include languages ​​that are currently not under threat.

By clicking on a specific marker on the map or on the name of the language to the right of it, you can find out details about the area you are interested in language of the world.

The map can naturally be zoomed to reveal details about the languages ​​of a particular region.

Friends, I hope the UNESCO map of the world's languages ​​has made you take a slightly different look at the pace of globalization and the irreversible processes that are constantly taking place on our planet. I will be glad to see your opinions on this matter in the comments!