There are about 5,000 living languages and dialects worldwide. The multilingualism of the Earth's population developed due to many reasons, for example, the disunity of the life of the ancient tribes, who lived in groups, and did not even suspect the existence of other people. Each tribe created its own so-called proto-language, which subsequently developed and branched out. There are about 13 such proto-languages in total.
People from all over the world speak different languages
. Sometimes in one state there are several dozen languages and dialects, for example, in the USA in New York alone people speak 129 languages and dialects. There are living (spoken), dead (for example, Latin) languages, the language of the deaf and dumb, artificial languages and even fictional ones, for example, the Elvish from J. Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings".
The common function of all varieties of languages is communicative. This is a means of sound, sign (written) and gesture communication, information transfer.
Until now, there are two scientific hypotheses of the origin of languages, as well as many myths and legends. Some scientists suggest that all modern languages originate from one language, the so-called pra-world. However, it is not necessarily the primary language. There may have been other languages in the past that have become extinct. This linguistic hypothesis is called the theory of monogenesis.
The second hypothesis, the polygenesis theory, is that the languages that exist today are descended from several proto-languages that were created and developed independently of each other. In any case, none of the concepts can be confirmed historically due to the age and lack of evidence.
One way or another, the tribes that inhabited the Earth several millennia ago already spoke different languages. The population of the planet grew, states were created, mass migrations and mixing of peoples took place, lands were seized, the social structure changed. All these changes could not but affect the development of languages.
Tribes grew, branched out, mastered new territories, the same languages developed differently in different places, dialects appeared. Thus, nowadays it is already difficult to imagine that, for example, English and Russian languages belong to different branches (Germanic and Balto-Slavic) of the same language family - Indo-European. Its proto-language, Proto-Indo-European, arose about 5-6 thousand years ago.
There are 5,000, and according to some sources, about 7,000 languages in the world. They are studied by the vast humanities of linguistics. Linguists investigate language laws and deduce general patterns, develop and supplement the existing classification. World languages have many common features, so linguistics studies similar trends in languages, analyzes them and derives universal hypotheses that are characteristic of most known languages.
Why so many languages?
There is no single answer to this question, as well as to all questions concerning the distant past. There are several versions. According to one of them, there is a single language from which all the others were born. According to another version, Neanderthals had a person with two mutations in the FOXP2 gene on the 7th chromosome, as a result of which this person's body became capable of language.
The question of language began to be asked by people a very long time ago, since ancient egypt. Ancient people, when faced with strangers, did not understand their speech and considered them second-class people. The Greeks contemptuously called them "barbarians" due to the fact that speech seemed like a meaningless set of sounds: "bar-bar-bar". Now with the help of a computer, people can recreate many ancient languages based on the roots modern words. By studying languages from different angles, linguists have found that many languages, even at first glance completely different, have something in common. But why are they different? You can answer based on observations of languages modern people. In Russian, there are words that are called differently in different regions. Some people call “beets” “beet”, “Thursday” - “four”, “border” - “curb”. It all depends on the dialects. Neighbors have almost no differences in language, those who live at a distance differ individual words or sounds. But their speech can still be understood. But to understand the neighbors of neighbors is no longer so easy. And what the distant ones say is completely incomprehensible. This is how it appears new language. It is easy to determine that Russian and French are different languages: the speakers of one do not understand the speakers of the other at all. What is "pomme" in French? It is unlikely that a person who has not studied French will guess that this is an “apple”. And if you compare Russian and Ukrainian: "apple", then there is no need for translation, the word is understandable, of course. Despite the fact that the languages are different, people who speak them can easily understand each other - there is a lot in common between them. But in addition to the remoteness of peoples from each other in distance and time, the appearance of different languages is very strongly influenced by geography. On the island of New Guinea, the population speaks nearly a thousand different languages! And all because the territory of the island is dotted with mountains and jungle. It is difficult for people to move around it, they rarely communicate, almost never exchange new words, so each village has developed its own language. And linguists call the Caucasus a “mountain of languages”. There was even an old Arabic legend: “Allah had a bag in which different languages were stored. Traveling around the world, he gave each nation one language. But when he traveled the whole world, except for the Caucasus, there were still a lot of languages in the bag. Allah is simply turned the bag over the mountains and poured out all the languages. Therefore, now every tribe there has its own dialect. There are a lot of such countries and localities with different dialects.
According to biblical traditions, in ancient times people became so proud that they planned to build a city and a tower as high as heaven. The Lord God decided to interfere with the builders by mixing their languages.
The result of God's wrath was not long in coming. The builders could not understand each other, thus the construction of the skyscraper was stopped, and people dispersed throughout globe.
There is an explanation in the difference between the language of people and scientific point vision. Linguists say that language, as a means of communication between people, is constantly changing. It is argued that there is no barrier that would protect him from change.
There are about 5,000 living languages and dialects worldwide. The multilingualism of the Earth's population developed due to many reasons, for example, the disunity of the life of the ancient tribes, who lived in groups, and did not even suspect the existence of other people.
Each tribe created its own so-called proto-language, which subsequently developed and branched out. All languages that have evolved from the same proto-language can be attributed to one "family" of languages. Around the world, there are about 13 families of languages, from which many of the existing languages have arisen.
"Why do people speak different languages?" - everyone asks this question in childhood, but not many solve this riddle for themselves, even as adults. From time immemorial, people have tried to answer this question: there are biblical legend, and folk tales, and scientific hypothesis. All these versions are based on one simple fact, which is not difficult to notice even without special linguistic education: even very different languages very often have a lot in common.
legends
To the question of why people speak different languages, the legend of Australia has its own, very original answer: once peoples were divided into “clean” and “impure”. Both were cannibals, but they ate different parts of the body - the “clean” ate meat, the “unclean” - internal organs. From domestic differences, according to the natives, language differences also went.
The tribes from Indochina have their own vision of the problem: each of the races that make up humanity had its own dialect. There are six such races in total, and all of them, like branches, twist from a giant pumpkin, the “progenitor”.
Less exotic, but just as interesting, is the version of Amazonia: God separated the languages - he needed this so that, having ceased to understand each other, people began to listen to him more.
There is a belief in the Iroquois tribe that people who once understood each other quarreled and therefore lost " mutual language”, spoke different. This disunity happened, according to the myth, not even among strangers, but within the same family!
There is a beautiful legend about languages that belongs to the Navajo Native American tribe. According to their mythology, they are created by a certain deity, which they call "the changing woman." It was she who created them in the first place and allowed them to speak her language. However, later she also created bordering peoples, each of which endowed her own language.
In addition, many peoples have beliefs about the only true, correct language. So, the language of the Egyptians was given to them by the god Ptah, and the ancestors of the Chinese were taught their sacred language by the legendary emperors of ancient times.
Bible
There are, however, more familiar explanations for why people speak different languages; according to the Bible (Genesis, chapter 11), most are familiar with one of the most interesting Christian parables about the so-called Babylonian pandemonium.
This legend tells about the sin of the Babylonian kingdom. Its inhabitants were so mired in vanity and departed from obedience to the Lord that they decided to build such a high tower in their city that it would reach heaven - so people wanted to "equal" with God. However, God did not allow the sinners to carry out their plan: he confused the languages so that they could no longer communicate - so the Babylonians were forced to stop the construction.
Many people know popular expression « Babel". It means turmoil, confusion, turmoil and general misunderstanding - what happened when people lost their "common language". Thus, about why people speak different languages, the Bible gives a more reasonable answer than archaic folk traditions.
scientific theory
However, science also provides an equally interesting clue. After all, languages not only differ from each other, but are also classified into families, branches and groups - depending on the degrees of kinship. So, the languages of Europe come from the Proto-Indo-European language. Today it is not known to us (it can only be reconstructed), and no written monuments in this language have come down to us. But many factors point to its existence.
However, if there was once, why are there so many of them today? The question of why people speak different languages is explained quite simply from a scientific point of view: language, by its very nature, tends to divide almost indefinitely. This happens because of the geographical division. Since humanity began to divide into ethnic groups and states, such groups have ceased to communicate with each other - therefore, the language within each group has developed in its own way.
language families
There are also more recent divisions into languages. So, for example, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian and many others are related: their similarity is noticeable - more or less - even to the naked eye. It happened because they came from the same language family - Slavic. It would seem that the peoples are so close, and border on each other - but still, so many different ones came out of the Old Slavonic language! It turns out that even large territories and cultural differences (which is worth one division into Catholics and Orthodox!) play such a significant role.
What's happening with languages now
But has language ceased division? No matter how. It turns out that even now within a single language, separated by borders, there is a delimitation. For example, the descendants of Russians who remained in Alaska after its transition to the United States today speak a very strange version of Russian, which “ordinary” speakers, if they understand, then clearly with with great difficulty.
"Different languages" of one people
But even in not so distant areas there are differences. For example, it's no secret to anyone that "entrance" and "front", "shaurma" and "shawarma" are the same thing, but for some reason both exist. Why does the language change within even one country? All for the same simple reason: St. Petersburg and Moscow, Arkhangelsk and Krasnodar are so far apart that even in the absence of isolation and the existence of federal funds mass media its own peculiarities inevitably arise everywhere.
The situation is different, for example, in Germany. If in Russia a resident of the capital is still able to intuitively guess what, for example, "green" in some village dialect, then a German from one region of Germany may not understand a German speaking a different dialect at all.