Language biographies
Introduction
Reason is common, the spirit in each language has its own particular form.
One of the most interesting aspects of languages is the way they differ from one another. These differences cut across the full spectrum of what it means to speak a language, from the sounds speakers use to form words to the different ways politeness is shown, and the ways in which important objects are identified and named. Although it is a little difficult to pin down in objective terms, there is a long tradition of referring to these collective differences between languages as their ‘genius’.
In this book we decided to make a selection of case-study languages to allow us to explore these differences, while at the same time giving readers the opportunity to become familiar with some languages they may previously have known little about. We have chosen languages that vary according to their size and status and that represent a range of different sound systems, grammatical features, lexical structures, and areas of research activity. The languages on which we focus are:
- English (a West Germanic language with a staggering number of speakers included in the more than seven billion people in the world)
- Auslan (the sign language of Australia)
- Gurindji (a Pama-Nyungan language traditionally spoken in the Victoria River district of the Northern Territory, Australia)
- Japanese (an East Asian language and the national language of Japan)
- German (a West Germanic language, with official or co-official status in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol (Italy), Luxembourg and Liechtenstein)
- Mali (Baining) (a Papuan language spoken on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea)
- Māori (the traditional language of the original inhabitants of New Zealand)
- Russian (the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, with large speech communities in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Uzbekistan and Israel)
- Turung (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in six villages in Assam in Northeast India).
English is included because it is often easiest to learn new linguistic concepts by thinking about them in a language that you already know. So we often start with English and then dip into these other languages so you can experience just how different linguistic categories can be across languages and how differently they can be realised.
The purpose of this material is to provide a brief introduction to each language and to signal where in the book each language is of particular interest to us. You don’t need to know the intimate details of these languages and their speech communities or the technical terminology we use here. This is just to give you an orientation to the languages we are focusing on.
Basic data on the major languages described here (English, German, Japanese and Russian) was drawn from relevant entries in Brown (2006) and language examples are drawn from a range of sources, including online dictionaries.