General Linguistics

The study of linguistics addresses the structure, phonetics, phonology, and morphology of the nature of languages. Historical linguistics regards the linguistic change of languages over time and their relationships to other languages. Simply put, languages change because people and cultures need to change and adapt to societal differentiation. Yet, change can hinder communication. The spoken and written languages evolve over time, many taking a generation or two to create sub-languages with words that only the present generation can understand. People migrate, learn new languages in a distinct dialect, adding to the regional dialect and language of an area and incorporate new linguistic distinctions that can overtime spread to the greater population based on the influence of the migrating group. Many linguists view historical linguistics as a part of life's evolutionary process.

General Linguistics Journal

Saussure's 1910 Lecture on General Linguistics

Languages List

Lexicon Tools

Linguistic Terms Glossary

Lexicon of Linguistics

Language and the Brain

Ethnologue: Languages of the World

Language and Gender

Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights

Historical Linguistics

Human language is not static. It evolves over time, much like stages of the human existence, beginning at a very elementary level and progressing to a complex and intricate system. Historical linguistics studies this change throughout time. Etruscan script, for instance, is nearly identical to Roman script; but the meanings and grammatical structure of the words and sentences have been lost. Finding a language that evolved from Etruscan would help linguists discern the meaning and grammatical structure of the language. It is important to study the whole of history: evolution, language relationships, and civilizations, as well as the languages themselves, to put it into a linguistically-sound perspective.

The Rosetta Project

Language Relationships

Proto IE Ancient History Sourcebook

Writing Systems and Languages of the World

African Writing Systems

NOVA: In Search of the First Language

Types of Language Change

Indo-European

The Indo-European language family is vast, encompassing most major European languages, and the Middle Eastern languages from Iran, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. Its history is diverse, long, and colorful, second only to those languages of the Afroasiatic family. There are over three billion Indo-European speakers, with 60 percent of them ,or about 1.6 billion people, speaking Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, French, Italian, Marathi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, and German. The Indo-European languages are classified as the Anatolian, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic and Armenia languages, as well as Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian.

Areas Where the Indo-European Language is Spoken

Color Map of Indo-European Languages

Proto-Indo-European Language

Indo-European Language Policy

Indo-European Etymological Dictionary

Anatolian Databases

The Sumerian Language Page

Hittite Grammar Homepage

The Germanic Lexicon Project

Sino-Tibetan

Sino refers to Chinese and Tibetan dialects from areas of Tibet and Burma. Over 1,000 million people speak the Sinitic languages, over 980 million in China alone. There are eight main Chinese dialects: Cantonese, Hakka, Hsiang, better known as Hunan, Kan, Mandarin, Northern Min, Southern Min, and Wu. There has been a Chinese language revolution of sorts, efforts to streamline Chinese characters and to standardize a main Chinese language throughout China. Taiwan ranks a distant second in the Sinitic family with 19 million speakers; and, the final million is scattered among countries throughout Southeast Asia. The Tibeto-Burman family has over 300 languages with around three million speakers.

Asian Language Terminology

The Chinese Linguistics Page

Zhongwen Chinese Characters and Culture

The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus

Numbers in Sino-Tibetan Languages

Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks

Tibeto-Burman Languages

Chinese Culture: Language and Writing

Nostratic

This proposed macro-family includes indigenous Indo-European, Afroasiatic, and Dravidian language families. It may be further subdivided into the Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Elamite, Sumerian, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut families. The Proto-Nostratic language is a hypothetical Nostratic family language that may be the ancestral language of those in the macro-family, although this is controversial and not widely accepted. The 20th-century Nostratic hypothesis originated with linguist Holger Pedersen. Its name is derived from the Latin word nostrates, which means "fellow countrymen."

Nostratic Language Putting a Wrench Into the Works?

Tower of Babel Project

The Nostratic Linguistic Macrofamily

Nostratica: Resources on Distant Language Relationship

Database Query Form Nostratic Etymology

Basque

Linguists are uncertain of the exact origins of the Basque language, most classifying the language as an isolated language with no known relatives. Records of the language can be dated to 1000 C.E. The Basque people withstood many invasions within Spain, but the language persisted, finally seating itself when Basque-speaking regions became incorporated with Castilian speakers. Still, throughout history, the language struggled to survive, existing today mainly in the province of Guipuzcoa, and the Navarra, Alava, and Vizcaya areas of Spain. There are around one million speakers of the language worldwide, also found in France, Europe, North and South America.

Spanish Linguistical Glossary

All About Basque

Medieval Iberian-Basque Names

Euskara

Official Basque Euskara Language Site

Native American

Native American language is both diverse and complex. There may have been over one thousand languages spoken in the Americas, about 250 of them in the United States. Many of them had complex grammatical systems, but no writing systems, save the Mayan ideographic system, until the advent of the Europeans to the Americas. The largest populations of indigenous speakers with over 148,000 are the Navajo, located in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The Choctaw language has just over 9,200 speakers in comparison. In between fall the Cree, Ojibwa, Cherokee, Dakota, Apache, and Blackfoot languages.

Native American Languages

Amerindian Language Families

Teaching Indigenous Languages

Indigenous Native Americans

Native American Language Renewal

Multicultural and Multilingual Native American Links