Posted on: November 18, 2019 by admin
How old is human language? Up till this day, nobody knows when exactly a spoken language was used to effectively communicate, but researchers believe that spoken languages have been evolving with humanity that keeps developing in stages, which also developed further when people spoke to more than one language, allowing the existence of expert translators and interpreters.
It is believed that humans spread to the world out of Africa, so languages have gradually evolved and increased in number as people spread to different locations.
Some people will be surprised to know that New Guinea has a very high number of spoken languages, almost a quarter of the overall languages available globally – which are about 7,000. So, this island shows the greatest variation in the number of languages, and the reason for that is the historical separation of the communities by great geographical barriers such as volcanic islands and rivers.
Another amazing fact is that English is not the most common spoken language globally, and it doesn’t even rank second. The most spoken language – thanks to the greatest population – is Chinese, which is spoken by about a billion people. The second language does not follow the population ranking, so it’s not Hindi, but rather Spanish – which is spoken in Spain, Central and South American as well as the Caribbean. English comes third on the list.
Do you speak Esperanto? Probably not. This is one of the artificial languages, which is not a real language on its own, but rather created by a group or community for different reasons. Esperanto was one of these languages, which was intended to become an international language, but it never really went anywhere, but the concept was based on having a language that is not related to any specific country, which makes it universal – but music remains the universal language, apologies Esperanto. Esperanto is not the only one, there are more than 200 odd non-natural languages that have been created in our world.
AUSLAN sign language is one of the most useful artificial languages that are being translated between communities to communicate with the deaf.
Perhaps some of the difficult translations are the words that belong to Onomatopoeia, which are derived from the sounds of nature, which although they are derived from nature like the sounds of the wind or an animal, these are still not uniform and require expert translation to communicate.
But who decided to WRITE a spoken language? The language was used to verbally communicate, but then letters and characters were developed so a language can be written down, with Hebrew, Sumerian and Basque being the first languages to have a written format. In order to written down a language, we either use a characters, letters or scripts. While the English language uses 26 letters, some others use up to 74, such as Khmer – the official language of Cambodia.
