LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE

Language is a form of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds that are understood by a group of people to have the same meaning. A collection of languages related to each other because of having a common ancestor is known as a language family. An individual language may have several dialects, i.e., forms spoken in different areas. According to linguists, languages can be classified into three basic types according to their structure. These are (a) mOl1osyllabic, where words aSSllme different meanings depending on their position in the sentence, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Tibetan; (b)agglutinative, where prefixes and suffixes can alter words, as in Malay, Japanese and many African languages; and (c) inflexional, where flexibility marks the words and they
can be modified to give the required meaning, as in, English, French and other Indo-European languages in­cluding Urdu, Bengali and Hindi.
Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of the people in the world. To this group belong the Germanic, Romanic, Balto-Slavic and the Indo-Aryan branches. Sind­Tibetan is another language family. Basque is the only
language to survive in Europe from the period prior to the . Indo-European onslaught. Uralic and Altaic language fami­lies are also prevalent in Europe and Asia. Finnish and Hungarian are Uralic languages.
Africa has a large number of languages-as many as 1000. In the northern region Arabic is used. In the south linguists have classified the languages into three main families-Niger.-Congo, Khoisan and Nilo-Saharan.