Source | Language Spring and Autumn
Current machine translation technology can be divided into two categories: one is Rich Resource NMT, which refers to language pairs with abundant bilingual corpora (e.g., Chinese – English); the other is Low Resource NMT, which refers to language pairs lacking sufficient bilingual corpora (e.g., Chinese – Hebrew).
Currently, machine translation has performed very well on Rich Resource languages, even achieving or exceeding human translation levels on certain training sets. However, Low Resource translation has just begun, with many interesting studies, and the overall level is still relatively primitive. — Zhou Ming, Vice President of Microsoft Research Asia
Based on the research results of historical comparative linguistics, it is generally believed that the world’s languages can be divided into more than a dozen or twenty language families according to their kinship, among which the more well-known ones include Indo-European Family, Sino-Tibetan Family, Uralic Family, Altaic Family, Semitic-Hamitic Family, Caucasian Family, Dravidian Family, Austronesian Family, Indo-Iranian Group, etc.
Historical linguistics categorizes all languages that come from a common ancestral language into the same language family, and below the language family, there are further divisions into language groups, branches, languages, dialects, and local dialects, with language groups further subdivided into subgroups.
The Indo-European Family is the largest language family in the world and the most widely studied. It includes many of the world’s most important languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, etc. These languages are the official languages of many countries and organizations, and play an extremely important role in global business, science, academia, communication, and international conferences. The speakers of these languages account for more than half of the world’s population. The Indo-European Family also includes widely spoken languages such as Portuguese, Hindi, Bengali, etc. Classical languages related to religion, culture, and philosophy are also found in the Indo-European Family, such as Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, Pali, etc.
Languages in the Indo-European Family exhibit inflectional characteristics (verbs and nouns change their endings based on their roles in sentences). Some languages (like English) have lost many inflectional changes during their evolution and have become relatively simple.
The distribution of the Indo-European Family extends from the Americas, through Europe, to the northern Indian subcontinent. It is generally believed that Proto-Indo-European originated in the forested areas north of the Black Sea during the Neolithic period (around 7000 BC). The original inhabitants of the European continent began migrating between 3500 BC and 2500 BC, moving west to the westernmost part of Europe, south to the Mediterranean, north to Scandinavia, and east to India.
The Celtic Group is a relatively small language group within the Indo-European Family. Celtic languages were widely spread across Europe early on, but due to the conquests of the Romans and Germans, as well as major migrations, speakers of Celtic languages were pushed to areas such as Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The main languages included in the Celtic Group are Welsh, Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gaelic, along with some extinct languages such as Cornish, Gaulish, and Manx. A branch of the Celts migrated back to France, and their language is called Breton. Welsh uses a subject-verb-object sentence structure.
The Germanic Group originated from Old Norse and Saxon. The most widely used language in the world, English, is a member of the Germanic Group. English is closest to Frisian, spoken along the North Sea coast and islands. Other languages in this group include German and Dutch. The Dutch language has variants such as Flemish and Afrikaans; German has a variant that uses Hebrew letters called Yiddish.
The North Germanic branch (or Scandinavian branch) includes Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic, which has retained many characteristics of Old Norse due to its long isolation from the continent. Faroese is closely related. Finland is also associated with the Scandinavian countries, but Finnish does not belong to the Indo-European Family.
The East Germanic languages have become extinct, including Gothic in Central Europe and Vandal in North Africa. German nouns have three genders and four cases. English has lost case and gender variations.
The Romance Group, also known as the Latin Group, consists of languages that evolved from Latin. Major languages in the Romance Group include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Italian and Portuguese are the languages closest to Latin. French and Latin are only similar in spelling, while their pronunciations have diverged significantly. Spanish is heavily influenced by Arabic and Basque, while Romanian is surrounded by Slavic languages and is greatly affected by them.
Minor languages in the Romance Group include Catalan in northeastern Spain, Provençal in southern France, and Moldovan. Besides Latin, extinct Romance languages include Oscan, Dalmatian, Umbrian, etc. Latin nouns have three genders and six cases, making it a highly inflected language, adopting a subject-verb-object syntactic structure.
The Slavic Group is located in Eastern Europe and generally uses the Cyrillic alphabet. A notable feature of the Slavic languages is the development of complex consonant clusters; for example, Serbian is called srpski, while Croatian is called hrvatski; nouns have many cases.
The East Slavic branch includes Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.
The West Slavic branch includes Polish, Czech, and Slovak. Czech and Slovak were once collectively called Bohemian.
The South Slavic branch includes Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, and Bosnian, separated by Hungarian, which does not belong to the Indo-European Family.
There are two Baltic languages in the three Baltic states: Lithuanian and Latvian. Estonian and Finnish are related but do not belong to the Indo-European Family. This is the third European language that does not belong to the Indo-European Family.
Lithuanian is one of the oldest languages in the Indo-European Family and plays an important role in studying the origins and evolution of the Indo-European languages. The extinct language in the Baltic Group is Old Prussian.
Greek is a distinct branch. Modern Greek is a descendant of the standard language Koine. The Greek used in Homer’s epics is called Ancient Greek, which has many differences from Modern Greek. Greek nouns have three genders and four cases, using a unique Greek alphabet. This alphabet evolved from the Phoenician alphabet and is one of the oldest alphabets in the world. Both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets evolved from the Greek alphabet.
The Albanian language area is located east of the Adriatic Sea and south of the Serbian-Croatian language area. Its core vocabulary shows that it is an independent branch of the Indo-European Family.
In Asia Minor, there is another independent branch of the Indo-European Family—Armenian. This language has a rich consonant system and many borrowed words from Persian.
The Indo-European Family’s major branch in Asia is called the Indo-Iranian Group. It consists of the Iranian and Indian branches. The Iranian branch evolved from Old Persian. The earliest documents are inscriptions from the time of Darius I of the Persian Empire and the now-extinct Avestan language.
The main surviving languages in the Iranian branch include Persian and Kurdish. To the east is Pashto in Afghanistan, to the west is Ossetian in the Caucasus, and Tajik in Tajikistan.
The Indian languages in the Indo-Iranian Group are numerous, most of which evolved from Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the standard language of ancient India and the language of literature, art, and scholarly works. Pali is the language of some ancient Indian Buddhist scriptures.
Among the modern Indian languages, important ones include Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, and Sinhalese. Hindi, Nepali, and Bengali use Devanagari script or its variants. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and uses Arabic script due to its Muslim population. Sinhalese is the national language of Sri Lanka and uses a script derived from Pali.
There are many dialects in the Indian languages, with the more widely spoken ones being Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Oriya, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Bihari, Assamese, etc.
Additionally, the Indian languages include Maldivian, Romani, etc. Languages in southern India, such as Tamil, do not belong to the Indo-European Family. For example, Hindi in northern India is closer to English, French, and Greek, while having no relation to the languages in southern India.
Based on manuscripts from the sixth century found in Xinjiang, it is known that Tocharian was spoken in Central Asia. The Tocharians were a highly cultured people who were defeated by the Uyghurs around the year 1000 and subsequently disappeared.
Hittite is an ancient language of Asia Minor, with cuneiform inscriptions.
In terms of the number of speakers, the Sino-Tibetan Family is the second largest language family after the Indo-European Family. It includes the most widely spoken language in the world—Mandarin Chinese.
The Sino-Tibetan Family is generally divided into four language groups: the Sinitic Group, the Tibeto-Burman Group, the Tai Group, and the Miao-Yao Group. There has been ongoing debate in academia regarding the classification and affiliation of the Sino-Tibetan Family. Some Western scholars generally believe that the Tai and Miao-Yao groups do not belong to the Sino-Tibetan Family but to the Austroasiatic Family. This article, from the perspective of most scholars in mainland China and some Western scholars, includes them in the Sino-Tibetan Family.
Languages in the Sino-Tibetan Family are generally tonal languages composed of monosyllabic characters. Words are composed of single-syllable characters, each with a tone. Mandarin has four tones, Thai has five tones, and Cantonese has nine tones. Many languages are isolating languages, using function words and word order as the main means of expressing grammatical meaning.
The Sinitic Group includes various languages used by the Han people within China, namely Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Gan, Xiang, Hakka, Jin, Hui, Pinghua, etc. These languages utilize over 50,000 Chinese characters, with around 6,000 commonly used characters.
The major languages in the Tibeto-Burman Group include Tibetan and Burmese; minor languages include Yi, Lisu, Lahu in southern China, Karen in Myanmar, Dzongkha in Bhutan, and Newari in Nepal. Most of these languages derive their scripts from Indian scripts.
Also known as the Tai-Kadai language family or Zhuang-Dong language family, it includes Thai, Lao, and the Zhuang, Bouyei, Dong, and Nung languages in China.
The Miao-Yao Group mainly includes the Miao, Yao, and She languages spoken by ethnic minorities in China.
The Semitic-Hamitic Family, also known as the Afro-Asiatic Family, is mainly distributed in the Arabian Peninsula in Asia and northern Africa. The name Semitic-Hamitic comes from the names of Noah’s two sons in biblical legend. According to the Bible, Noah’s son Shem is the ancestor of the Hebrews, while Ham is the ancestor of the Assyrians and Africans.
The main common features of the Semitic-Hamitic Family are: consonants include not only voiceless and voiced consonants but also a type of emphatic consonant formed in the back of the mouth and throat, also known as pharyngeal sounds. Nouns have cases and genders, but they are simpler than in the Indo-European Family. Arabic and Hebrew alphabets contain only consonants, and vowels are represented by diacritics added to the consonants. When writing, usually only consonants are written, and readers need to infer the correct vowels from the context.
Arabic is an important member of the Semitic Group. It is the language of many Islamic countries and serves as their religious, literary, and official language, as well as one of the six working languages of the United Nations.
Malta, a Catholic country, uses Maltese, which employs the Latin alphabet but belongs to the Semitic Group.
Another important language in the Semitic Group is Hebrew. It is the language of Judaism and was used in the earliest manuscripts of the Old Testament. Hebrew has its own unique characters and has been revived as a spoken language after a period of extinction, and it is now the national language of Israel.
Other languages in the Semitic Group include Amharic from Ethiopia, Akkadian from the Assyrian Empire, and Aramaic.
Finally, it is worth mentioning Aramaic, which was once the main official language of the Persian Empire, spreading widely across the Middle East and competing with Greek, replacing many other languages like Hebrew and Assyrian. Later, it was marginalized due to the expansion of Arabic and is now found in isolated pockets in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.
This is an extinct language group, including ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 4000 BC and later Coptic, which used a script similar to Greek letters. The Egyptian language died out in the 17th century, replaced by Arabic.
The Berber Group is located in the mountainous regions of North Africa, with representative languages including Tuareg, Kabyle, and Tamazight. They have resisted the advance of Arabic in North Africa.
Primarily distributed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, it includes Somali, Galla, Beja, etc.
The Chadic Group includes about 600 languages spoken in Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. The most important of these is Hausa, which is the main language in Nigeria. It used to use the Arabic alphabet but now uses the Latin alphabet.
The Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and Chadic groups can collectively be referred to as the Hamitic Branch.
As mentioned earlier, there are three European languages that do not belong to the Indo-European Family: Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian. They belong to the Uralic Family. The original inhabitants of the Uralic language migrated from the Siberian side of the Ural Mountains to Europe about 1500 years ago, and their lifestyle has completely Europeanized, but the language has retained its original form. The Uralic Family is divided into two major branches: the Finno-Ugric Group and the Samoyed Group.
This group is divided into two branches. The Finnish branch includes very similar Finnish and Estonian, along with small languages from Siberia such as Mordvin, Udmurt, Komi, etc. The Ugric branch includes Hungarian and closely related languages like Ostyak and Vogul in mid-west Siberia.
About 18,000 people speak languages from the Samoyed Group along the Yenisei River, such as Selkup, Nenets, Nganasan, Enets, etc.
Uralic languages are more inflected than the previous language families, with rich suffix variations. Finnish nouns have 15 cases, while Hungarian has 17! Some common country names become unfamiliar in these languages, such as Finland, Germany, and France being called Suomi, Saksa, and Ranska, respectively.
The Altaic Family is named after the Altai Mountains in Central Asia and is now mainly distributed in China, Mongolia, Turkey, and some Central Asian countries. The peoples who speak various languages of the Altaic Family were early nomadic peoples from northern China. The Huns, Xiongnu, Xianbei, Turks, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongols, and Manchus established states in this region extending to West Asia and Eastern Europe. Due to unstable governance, wars, and migrations, there has been significant population movement and contact with other languages, making the historical development of Altaic languages quite complex.
The Altaic Family is divided into three major language families: Turkic, Mongolic, and Manchu-Tungusic.
The Turkish language, as a member of the Turkic Group, is the westernmost and most widely spoken language in the Altaic Family. Many languages of the former Soviet republics are also members of the Turkic Group, such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek; additionally, there are Tatar, Uyghur, Bashkir, and other languages. Some translations of ethnic minorities in China differ slightly: “Uzbek” is translated as “乌孜别克族”; “Kyrgyz” is translated as “柯尔克孜族”; “Tatar” is translated as “塔塔尔族”.
Mongolian is spoken in the Mongolian People’s Republic and among the Mongols in northern China. Mongolia uses the Cyrillic alphabet, while the Mongols in China still use a vertical script.
Minor languages in the Mongolian Group include Buryat and Kalmyk.
This language group includes Evenki, or Tungusic, as well as Manchu, Sibo, etc. However, most Manchu people in China can only speak Chinese.
Earlier, the Uralic and Altaic families were collectively referred to as the “Ural-Altaic Family.” However, further research has revealed more distinct characteristics, indicating they should not be merged into the same family.
Additionally, some linguists advocate for including Japanese and Korean in the Altaic Family due to shared characteristics with Altaic languages. However, the numerous differences make it difficult to explain, leading many to believe they belong to the Altaic Family only as a hypothesis. Many others believe the classification of Japanese and Korean remains undetermined or that they form their own branches. There has yet to be a consensus on the classification of Japanese and Korean.
Japanese uses Chinese characters and two sets of kana. Korean used to use Chinese characters but now employs a unique phonetic writing system developed over 600 years ago. Both Japanese and Korean have developed honorifics that vary based on the status of the speaker and the addressee. Moreover, there are differences in vocabulary used by different genders in Japanese.
The Altaic Family, including Japanese and Korean, are typical agglutinative languages: they derive new words by adding affixes to the root word and use grammatical affixes for morphological changes.
Phonologically, languages in the Altaic Family, including Korean, exhibit vowel harmony characteristics. Vowel harmony refers to the classification of vowels into two categories (positive and negative) based on their place of articulation, requiring that all vowels in the same word either be positive or negative. For example, Turkish has two plural suffixes: -lar and -ler. At (horse) becomes atlar in plural; while ev (house) becomes evler.
The Caucasian Family is named after the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The most prominent language in the southern branch, the Kartvelian Branch, is Georgian, along with other languages such as Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan. The northwestern branch, the Abkhaz-Adyghean Branch, mainly includes Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian, and Abaza. In the northeastern region, there are Chechen, Ingush, Dagestanian, Avar, Lezgian, Lak, and Tabasaran languages.
A common characteristic of Caucasian languages is the presence of numerous complex consonant clusters. Some extinct Caucasian languages contained as many as 81 individual consonants. The Kabardian language of southern Russia has only three vowels, which often disappear in actual speech. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to speak with only consonants; perhaps due to the high-altitude environment, people intentionally avoid opening their mouths to produce vowels to increase speech speed and reduce heat loss.
Also known as the Malayo-Polynesian Family, this family consists of over a thousand languages that span from the Indian Ocean, the Malay Peninsula, Southeast Asia, across the Pacific to Easter Island. The speakers of this family are said to have originated in the Yellow River Valley, migrating to the Philippines around 2500 BC and further to Indonesia and Pacific islands around 1000 BC.
This group includes the indigenous languages of Taiwan, such as Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, and Tsou. The speakers of these languages are all indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
Also known as the Malay Group, this is the largest branch of the Austronesian Family. Malay is used as a trade and cultural language in many places. Malay used to use Arabic script but switched to Latin script in the 20th century. This group also includes many languages in Indonesia such as Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese, etc.; and many languages in the Philippines, such as Visayan and Tagalog.
Additionally, there is a distant branch called Malagasy, which is the national language of the island nation of Madagascar in southern Africa. About 1500 years ago, a group of people from Indonesia crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. Although they have become Africans and their customs have Africanized, their language still exhibits characteristics of the Austronesian Family.
This group includes languages from smaller regions, such as Marshallese, Gilbertese, Yapese, Nauruan, and others.
This group includes Fijian, Solomonese, etc.
This group includes Maori in New Zealand and languages from some eastern Pacific islands, such as Samoan, Tahitian, Hawaiian, and Rapa Nui.
It is not difficult to find that the names of these language families generally bear the -nesian root. Literally, Austronesian means “southern island”; Indonesian means “Indian island”; Micronesian means “small island”; Melanesian means “black island”; Polynesian means “island group”.
The noun and verb forms in Austronesian languages change very simply. Malay has no tense or case changes. Plurals are formed by repeating the root, such as anak: child; anak anak: children.
In many Pacific languages, pronoun changes are complex. The possessive pronoun “we/our” in some Pacific languages is subdivided into “temporary possession” (e.g., car, book) and “permanent possession” (e.g., body parts). In some languages, the demonstrative pronoun “this” is divided into three variations: one for visible objects; one for objects that exist but are not visible at the time of speaking; and one for non-existent things. Additionally, in some languages, the first-person plural pronoun “we” is divided into two forms: “including the addressee” and “excluding the addressee.” The plural first-person pronoun in Melanesian languages also has three variations: dual aijumrau (the two of us); trial aijumtai (the three of us); plural aijam (all of us).
Another feature of the Pacific languages is that they have fewer consonants and vowels. Hawaiian has only eight consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W, and a glottal stop) and five vowels (A, E, I, O, U). Tagalog and Maori adopt a subject-verb-object grammatical structure. Malagasy follows a verb-object-subject structure.
The Austroasiatic Family is distributed in the eastern part of India to the southeastern region of Asia. It is generally divided into three language groups.
This group includes Vietnamese and Muong (both languages are spoken in Vietnam).
This group mainly includes Mon, the primary language of the former Thai kingdom, now spoken in scattered areas of Myanmar, Thailand, China, and Vietnam; Khmer, the national language of Cambodia; Nicobarese, located in the Nicobar Islands northwest of Sumatra; Khasi; and the Wa, Blang, and De’ang languages in China (mainly in Yunnan Province).
The Munda Group languages are scattered in northern India, including Munda, Korku, and nearly 20 other languages.
Among the Austroasiatic languages, Vietnamese is tonal, while the other languages are not. As mentioned earlier, some scholars believe that the Tai and Miao-Yao groups belong to the Austroasiatic Family.
In the previous section on the Indo-European Family, it was mentioned that most languages in northern India belong to the Indo-European Family, while languages in the south differ significantly. Most languages in southern India belong to the Dravidian Family. A notable feature of this family is the difficulty of pronunciation.
Major languages in the Dravidian Family include Tamil, spoken by approximately 18 million people, distributed in Tamil Nadu, northern Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, and is also one of the four national languages in Singapore; Malayalam, with about 6 million speakers; Telugu, with about 24 million speakers, distributed in the area north of Madras on the southeastern coast of India; and Kannada, spoken by about 10 million people in the Mumbai area. These languages use their own writing systems, characterized by curved and rounded South Indian script features.
Another Dravidian language called Brahui is spoken by 170,000 people in the Balochistan region.
Dravidian languages generally exhibit retroflex consonants (also known as apical sounds), a feature influenced by Indo-European languages of the Indian language family. This characteristic is significant in the languages of India. Additionally, Dravidian languages often exhibit agglutinative features, with complex changes in noun cases.
It is generally believed that the Dravidian Family originated in the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan and once covered the entire Indian subcontinent.
The Niger-Congo Family includes over 900 languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. This family originated in West Africa and gradually migrated to southeastern Africa.
The boundaries of African countries do not fully reflect language divisions, but rather showcase their colonial history. Therefore, African languages often do not adhere to national borders; typically, one language may be used in multiple countries, while a country may have several distinct languages.
The Niger-Congo Family includes nine language groups, with major languages such as Fulani, spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, and Burkina Faso; Malinke, used in Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, and Ivory Coast; Mende, mainly spoken in Sierra Leone; Twi, used in Ghana; Ewe, used in Ghana and Togo; Mossi, used in Burkina Faso; Yoruba, used in Nigeria; Igbo, used in Nigeria; Kpelle, used in Liberia; and Wolof, used in Senegal; Fang, used in Cameroon, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea.
In southeastern Africa, there is a large group of Bantu languages, which number in the millions. The most widely spoken language is Swahili, used in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi; other languages include Ganda in Uganda, Kinyarwanda in Rwanda, Rundi in Burundi, Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lingala in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa and Brazzaville), Kongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bemba in Zambia, Shona in Zimbabwe, and Ndebele in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and Tswana in Botswana.
Most languages in southern Africa commonly use tone to express grammatical meaning (occasionally used to distinguish word meanings). The Banda language in the Congo has three tones, and locals use three-toned drums to convey information. Efik has four tones, with m and n functioning as vowels.
Most languages in the Niger-Congo Family use rich prefixes and suffixes to modify nouns and verbs; nouns and verbs never appear alone. Fulani has 18 noun suffixes; Ndebele has 16 noun prefixes and a rich vocabulary to express kinship, such as u-baba (my father), u-yihlo (your father), u-yise (his father).
Shona has over 200 words for “walk,” such as mbwembwer (walk with a swaying butt), chakwair (walk in mud), donzv (walk with a cane), panh (walk a long distance), and rauk (walk with big steps). In Fulani, nouns are modified by changing the initial consonant to express grammatical meaning, such as jese (face), gese (faces), ngesa (big face).
Bantu languages adopt a quinary system, with the number six expressed as “five plus one.” Many African tribal languages feature unusual consonants such as click sounds and implosive sounds.
In addition to the ten major language families mentioned earlier, there are over a hundred smaller language families scattered around the world, many indigenous languages and languages of primitive tribes have not yet been fully understood and recognized by linguists. In the final chapter of this article, a brief introduction will be provided for some African languages that have not been covered, indigenous languages of the Americas, and languages that are not classified or are independent and do not belong to any language family.
In northeastern Africa, there is the Nilo-Saharan Family, which includes languages such as Nubian spoken in southern Egypt and Sudan, Dinka and Maasai spoken in northern Kenya. This family originated in the Ethiopian highlands and has not undergone major migrations for ten thousand years, thus largely retaining its original characteristics.
In southern Africa, there are a few languages belonging to the Khoisan Family, with two typical languages being Hottentot and Bushman, spoken in Namibia and South Africa. This family once covered a vast area of central and southern Africa but was replaced by the migrating Niger-Congo languages.
The Eskimo-Aleut Family covers areas in Siberia, Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands. The main language is the Inuit language of the Eskimo people. This language has a rich system of compound words, typically combining a verb with numerous nouns and modifiers to express meaning, which is equivalent to a sentence in other languages.
The Algonquian Family is distributed in the northeastern part of the American continent, including Ojibwa, Cree, Blackfoot, Micmac, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Potawatomi, Mohican, Delaware, etc. Many languages in this family distinguish nouns into two categories: animate and inanimate.
In Canada, the Athapascan Family includes Navajo and Apache. The Navajo language has many words to describe different shapes, colors, and positions of objects. In the eyes of the Navajo people, the world is composed of geometric shapes, and things are observed and described through geometric forms.
The Iroquoian Family is also located in North America, including Cherokee, Sioux, and Mohawk. The subject in Mohawk is marked on the verb according to gender, and the word order is flexible, a characteristic similar to that of the Bantu languages.
On the Pacific coast of North America, there is a Mosan Family, which includes Bella-Coola, Flathead, and Okanagan languages. Some of these languages have words that can function as both verbs and nouns. Only through context can the correct meaning be determined.
The Uto-Aztecan Family in North and Central America includes languages such as Hopi, Papago, and Comanche. The most important language in this family is Nahuatl, characterized by the consonant tl. This language employs a quinary system. In central Mexico, the Oto-Manguean Family includes over 150 languages across seven language groups. Many of these languages have tonal distinctions.
The Mayan Family in southern Mexico and Guatemala includes about 30 languages across eight language groups, with its ancient civilizations dating back to around 800 BC.
The Macro-Chibchan Family in Central America includes Miskito and Kuna languages spoken along the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua.
The Penutian Family is distributed across Central and South America, with the largest branch being the Araucanian language spoken in Chile.
The Carib Family is spread across the northern rainforest region of South America, including Carib, Panoan, and Chiquito languages. Among them, the Hixykaryana language spoken by about 350 people in the Brazilian rainforest has a unique word order of object-verb-subject, which is unique in South America.
The Andean-Equatorial Family covers a vast area of South America, including Quechua spoken by Inca people in Peru and Ecuador, Aymara in Bolivia, Guarani in Paraguay, Tupi in Brazil, and Arawak along the Caribbean coast.
Over 700 languages in Papua New Guinea are still largely unknown and under study. The languages on this island may be divided into six or seven major families, some small families, and some independent languages. Most Papuan languages have only a few thousand speakers and are not well known outside.
Many languages on New Guinea share the common feature of having dual pronouns, using different terms for “we” and “you” (the two of us); “you” and “you two”.
Kiwi has the most complex verb inflection structure known, relying on adding prefixes and suffixes to express sentence meanings. For example, odi means “to string a bow,” and by adding the following prefixes and suffixes: ri-mi-bi-du-mo-i-odi-ai-ama-ri-go, it expresses the meaning of “at some distant future time, they three will definitely string two bows”.
Yimas has four past tense variations to strictly differentiate the degree of proximity of the action’s occurrence to the time of speaking.
Ratokas has only 11 phonemes, the least of any known language. These 11 phonemes consist of five vowels and six consonants: A, E, I, O, U, B, G, K, P, R, T.
Some linguists believe that the languages of the Andaman Islands and Tasmania are related to Papuan languages.
Approximately 250 indigenous languages in Australia can be roughly divided into 23 families. Of these, 22 are distributed in the northern regions, such as Bunaban, Ngaran, and Yiwaidjan. The Pama-Nyungan language family in central and southern Australia has a complex pronoun system; for instance, the pronoun “we” has four forms: yunmi (the two of us, you and I); mintupals (the two of us, he and I); mipala (all of us, including you); melabat (all of us, excluding you). Jiwarli has three different verbs for “carry” to distinguish whether the object is in hand, on the head, or on the back. Many indigenous Australian languages use different vocabulary when speaking to different relatives. The Adnyamathanha language has ten sets of pronouns for addressing different relatives. The Dyirbal language has two almost completely different sets of vocabulary for each word. The nouns in this language have four genders.
Most indigenous languages have only three numerals: “one,” “two,” and “many.”
There are many languages in the world that do not belong to any language family, known as independent languages or language islands. For example, the Ainu language in Hokkaido, Japan, is nearly extinct. Porome is a language spoken by about a thousand people in Papua New Guinea and has no writing system. In the Kashmir region controlled by Pakistan, there is also a language without writing called Burushaski.
In the western part of the Pyrenees Mountains, about 500,000 people speak Basque, which is a remnant of the ancient Iberian language. The Basque language uses a vigesimal system, and the pronoun “it” has three forms, referring to objects at different distances from the speaker.
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