Functional classification

Areal classification.

Incorporating languages

1. Are characterized by coincidence of the word and sentence structure. Each word is incorporated in the sentence which looks like one indivisible unit.
2. The affirmative sentence opens with the subject, finishes with the predicate and all secondary parts are included in between.

Yakut:

ты — я, ата – жир, каа — олень, нмы — убивать, ркын — делать

тыатакаанмыркын — я жирных оленей убиваю

Actually, most languages can't represent this or that pure type. Usually it's possible to find features of different language types in one language. The dominant features are taken into consideration.

This classification shows territorial distribution of languages. The basic notions here are language areal, dialect areal, language union.

A language areal is a territory on which some language is used. The borders between the areas are very important because they show what languages are in close contacts. Several areas constitute a language union.

The Balkan Language Union:

- Bulgarian

- Macedonian

- Romanian

- Moldavian

- Albanian

- New Greek

Languages of the same union can be of different types and genetic similarity s not obligatory. The Affinity (генетическое родство) here can be observed very seldom and similarities between languages are required only due to long context. Language distribution greatly depends on political, economical and historical factors.

One of the basic factors is migration of population. e.g. there are more than 300 000 000 speakers of Spanish in the world and only 10% of them live in Spain. Portuguese (Brazil).

History also gives examples of language contents. In the first century b.c. when Roman occupied the territory of modern Spain and France they imposed their own language – Latin. Native languages were suppressed, but nor eliminated completely. Nowadays Spanish and French include 2 layers of vocabulary – the native layer which is called “substratum” and elements of the imposed language - “superstratum”.

Modern language situations also show language confluence. Most neighboring languages penetrate into one another and very often political boundaries coincide with territories of bi-linguism.

Portuguese – adstratum – French (peaceful borrowings)

It's a new approach to language division and up to now only some principles of it have been defined.

1. The total number of speakers of language.
2. Correlation of alive (living) and archaic (dead) ones.
3. Distribution of some language outside its original territory.
4. Correlation of written and non-written languages.
5. Correlation of genuine (естественные) and man-planned (man-designed) languages.

As for the nature of speaking community, languages are divided into three groups:

1. tribal languages
2. ethnic languages
3. national languages

As for the distributional languages outside the original territory, languages are divided into 4 groups:

1. local (Chinese for speaking diaspora in NY)
2. regional (on wide territories – the Tibetan language in China)
3. international (Russian for former republics)
4. world languages (The Club of World Languages – English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Arabic)

Functional study of languages also focuses on investigation of language situations. A language situation is a peculiar combination of some literary language and its social and geographical varieties. For each language this situation is specific and that's why situations are divided into monolingual, bilingual (prevail in the world) and polylingual. Situations are also divided into balanced and unbalanced. In the first case the languages in use are equal. In most cases situations are unbalanced when some language (languages) are dominant and others are restricted in official use (Russian in former republics). In India – Hindi and English are both official languages. But actually the situation is unbalanced. There are a lot of states where various ethnic languages are in function and historically they were in confrontation where varieties of Hindi were used. This population resists the use of Hindi and that's why they prefer English as a more neutral language.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-13