lecture 15

• Introduction to Language & Communication & Society LCS 111 Linguistics Department First floor, Old Arts Block.
• Lecture 15
• Key topics


  • Analysing data: how people use language to signal (index) their identities
  • Style and styling
  • Linguistic repertoire
  • Domain
• Textbook 294-311, chapter 11 [First Edition] & 302-319 [Second Edition]
• Style


  Construction of a particular identity (social personae)
• Repertoire


  The collection of forms, practices and linguistic features that a speaker can access and deploy in a conversation
• Repertoire includes 'whole' language(s) plus varieties or fragments of other languages
• Domains


  Institutional contexts and their congruent behavioural occurrences
• Language use varies according to context
• Joshua Fishman introduced the notion of domain
• Lecture 15: Language families & typologies
• Aims


  • Introduce a general overview of world languages
  • Discuss the traditional view of regarding languages as countable entities/things
  • Discuss how African languages were classified and challenges faced
  • To learn about language typologies and language families
• • Textbook pp 313-329 (1st Edition)
  • Textbook pp 321-339(2nd Edition) (Chapter 12)
• 11 official languages of South Africa


  • isiZulu
  • isiXhosa
  • isiNdebele
  • Siswati
  • Sesotho
  • Sesotho sa Leboa (Sepedi)
  • Setswana
  • Xitsonga
  • Tshivenda
  • English
  • Afrikaans
• Sotho cluster


  • Sesotho
  • Sesotho sa Leboa (Sepedi)
  • Setswana
• Nguni cluster


  • isiZulu
  • isiXhosa
  • isiNdebele
  • Siswati
• About 200 countries in the world
• Linguists disagree on the exact number of languages spoken in the world (+/- 5000? 6000? 7000?)
• Some categorise varieties as languages, others as dialects
• Some languages have not been given official status, or, they have been invisibilized
• Splitters


  View varieties of same language as different languages
• Lumpers


  View varieties as simply dialects of the same language
• Ways of classifying / grouping languages

  • Genetic (or genealogical)
  • Typologies
• Genetic (or genealogical) classification


  • Group languages into families, as sharing origins
  • Analyze linguistic (relatedness) features as they change over time (diachronically)
• 3 main language families in South Africa

  • Niger-Congo / Niger-Kordofonian (Bantu languages)
  • Khoisan (Khoe e.g. Nama, Griqua; San languages)
  • Indo-European (Germanic, Romance, Indic) + Sign Language
• Niger-Congo = largest language phylum in Africa & world
• Benue-Congo = largest family in the Niger-Congo phylum
• Bantu langs = largest branch in the Benue-Congo family
• +/- 530 Bantu languages, 9 of these = South African official languages
• Cognates


  Words with common origin (ancestral root), related genetically
• Similarities also through borrowing
• Cognates


  • isibane (isiXhosa) vs. isibani (isiZulu) = lamp
  • ulwimi (isiXhosa) vs. ulimi (isiZulu) = language
• Borrowings


  • imoto (isiXhosa) from motorcar (English)
  • naartjie (Afrikaans) from nartei 'citrus' (Tamil)
• Proto-Bantu = 'common ancestor' (parent) language of Bantu languages
• Typological classification


  Based on language structure and rules, e.g. SVO (subject, verb, object) vs. VSO (verb, subject, object)
• Isolating language


  Morphemes (smallest meaningful units) can stand alone/be written separately
• Agglutinating language


  Morphemes tend to 'glue together' in a sequence, function together
• Isolating languages


  • Classical Chinese, Vietnamese, Yoruba, Thai
• Bantu languages have a noun class system with 23 noun classes
• Noun classes are used for concordial agreement between subjects and verbs in sentences