Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction by P. H. Matthews

Author:P. H. Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2003-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Map 4. Some major languages and families in Asia. The languages in italics are Indo-European. The extension of Austronesian especially is wider.

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The main families of the Old World

Eurasia in particular is an area across which people have traded and migrated, and formed shifting empires, throughout history. The INDO-EUROPEAN family is one of three with members in both continents (see Map 3 in the last chapter). The others are a smaller group classed as URALIC, which includes Hungarian and Finnish; also TURKIC, which includes a range of languages related to Turkish, in what was once the south of the Soviet Union. The main language of North Africa and the Near East is now Arabic, whose expansion accompanied that of Islam. This belongs to the SEMITIC family, which can be linked to others, including the language of ancient Egypt, in the northern half of Africa.

On the mainland of east Asia CHINESE includes Mandarin, Cantonese, and others, and is classed as a family with others to the west, which include Tibetan and Burmese. Note that neither Korean nor Japanese is part of that or any other known group. DRAVIDIAN in South India is a smaller independent family, whose largest member is Tamil. MON-KHMER is also an independent family, which includes Cambodian (Khmer) and Vietnamese, as is TAI, which includes Thai. The large AUSTRONESIAN family is centred in the islands off Southeast Asia, where it includes Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, Malay, Javanese, and most others in Indonesia. It also expanded eastwards across most of the Pacific; and westward to Madagascar. Elsewhere in Asia smaller familes are established, for example in the Caucasus.

In the southern half of Africa the largest clearly established family is BANTU, roughly from the Equator southwards. Swahili, in East Africa, is its largest member and is still spreading.

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