The Language Counting Paradox
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- čas přidán 6. 05. 2024
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Lots of languages and species are going extinct, but because others keep getting found or described, the official counts of languages and species are still increasing.
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Language death: when a language loses its last known native speaker.
- Species extinction: the termination of a species by the death of its last member.
- Ethnologue.com: the world’s foremost authority on the languages of the world and their current status.
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REFERENCES
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Anderson, S. (2012). Languages, Species, and Biological Parallels. Oxford University Press Blog. blog.oup.com/2012/07/why-do-h...
McWhorter, J. (2016). What’s a Language, Anyway?. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: www.theatlantic.com/internati...
IUCN RedList. (2024). Summary Statistics. www.iucnredlist.org/resources...
Ritchie, H. (2022). How Many Species Are There? Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/how-many-s...
Eberhard, Dave. (2024). Personal Communication. Senior Linguistics Consultant for Ethnologue. www.sil.org/biography/david-m...
Brown, E. (2018). Millennial Aboriginal Australians Have Developed Their Own Language. Atlas Obscura. www.atlasobscura.com/articles... - Věda a technologie
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the increase is probably because of the secret language made by me and bro in 5th grade
Is it Indo-European?
😂😂😂😂😂
Come to the Conlanging Community, where we have:
1. made up languages
2. people speaking essentially gibberish 80% of the time
3. erm....?
4. yeah that's about it
5. you should still join us though :D
@@cuitaro If you think about it, language is just structured and organized specific gibberish
@@Tower_Swagman Also names are sounds you make to capture someone's attention
About Arabic it's technically neither. It's classified as a "Dialect continuum" basically A can understand B which understand C which understands D which understands E but E and A can't understand each other.
That's very similar to how Germanic languages/dialects behave.
Though I'm a bit sad Bavarian and all its dialects are not freed from High German. :D
In that case that works out also from Punjabi to Assamese across the whole Hindi belt
The distinction between "language" and "dialect" seems even more blurry than species vs subspecies, since pretty much any 2 languages can "reproduce" if their speakers are exposed to each other, mixing languages by borrowing terms or even creating full-fledged creole languages, and people aren't limited to speaking one language/dialect.
Dude you just explained perfectly the Arabic dialects in one phrase
But if you put a and e together in a house for a couple of weeks I am sure they would come to a mutual understanding.
I feel extremely sad when language die it like a piece of history dies Infront of us
What is the value of dying languages? We don't need them
not just that, a language contains the soul of a people and all their cultural wealth
if it dies then it was useless anyways because nobody spoke it anymore
"I feel extremely sad when language die it like a piece of history dies Infront of us"
No. There are far too many languages out there.
I think in a perfect world all humans could speak with each other, so the less languages the better.
Politics also play a big part in this topic, at least in Europe! My home country of Finland alone has multiple dialects of finnish that were considered their own languages; in fact standard finnish is a rather recent language and is mostly based on what was then considered an academic language. I also speak a minority language that isn't officially recognised anywhere.
I was just having a convo today about the history of Europe's (post-Westphalia) insistence of Nationalism and the nation-state, and the repercussions, both good and bad, felt around the globe.
@@yondie491 That's certainly an interesting topic I indulge in quite often! The rise of finnish nationalims happened around the same time (1800s) and there is a lot to say about it... good and bad, like you said. While nationalism can be an effective tool to rile the masses into action against a common enemy, it also happens on the behalf of minorities who more often than not get assimilated into the majority, sometimes to the loss of identity and even language as a whole.
@@HulluRichie Finland is honestly one of the best examples of positive nationalism in Europe. They colonized *NO ONE*. They incorporated the Sámi of the north, but, to my understanding, never truly oppressed them, especially compared to the Russians and Swedes (the two colonizers of Finland (Suomi).) And, also to my limited understanding, the Sámi were never what modern people would recognize as an organized, sovereign state. But I don't know about about their history to say anything more than that.
As an American, I view a lot of European nationalism with confusion and moderate disdain (acknowledging, of course, our many, many faults, cuz duh). I was just having a conversation today about Old World vs New World citizenship birthrights and how it's one of the most stark contrasts in mentality. The only places in the Old World that has true Jus Soli are:
Chad, Lesotho, and, interestingly, Pakistan. That's it. (quite a few have restricted citizenship by birthright).
To a non-racist American... that kinda feels... racist (there are tons of Americans who stupidly think that we're a white, English-speaking nation, and they can bugger off).
Which is why we don't have any "protected nationalities" or "official languages" (note: our natives are different, but they're more like dual-nation citizens... it's complicated)
*EVERYONE* has the legal right to have official stuff done in their language. Full stop. Anytime you have to deal with the government, they don't have the right to force you to use an "official language"
This poster/sign is in virtually all government offices in the US:
ohr.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/ohr/publication/attachments/Language%20ID%20Desktop%20Poster.pdf
And... to me... *THAT* is equality.
Note: yes, we required functional English-speaking ability to become an immigrant, but there are tons of exceptions and, again, it's not legally required for anything official.
BUT... I also know my history enough to understand why Europe chose Balkanization. When virtually everyone has, at one time or another, oppressed everyone else... the oppressed tend to get a bit uppity about it. And that's very understandable.
Again, tho, kudos to the Finns (suomalaiset?) for not turning the tables and attempting to do to others what was done to them.
Note: I'm an odd American, I have literally 10 Finnish friends, in places like Kemi, Kuopio, Kasko (what's up w/ the K names?) and, of course, Helsinki.
And they all speak English really well. Better than many Americans.
@@yondie491 But Finland did colonize the sámi. There were boarding schools for stolen children whose culture and language were sometimes beaten out of them. In fact the UN is currently pressuring the finnish government to acknowledge the numerous - and ongoing - human rights violations towards the sámi (google: finland violated sami rights). Additionally Sápmi (the traditional land of sámi) is suffering due to tourism and both legal and illegal mining, the landscapes and ecosystems changed by dams. Despite Sápmi being split into four different parts due to current country borders, the sámi see it as one continuous land - so already by proxy there are issues when it comes to just the land area.
“And, also to my limited understanding, the Sámi were never what modern people would recognize as an organized, sovereign state.” - this is a dangerous mindset to have when it comes to indigenous peoples, other minorities and oppressed groups. Ask yourself: why should I only listen to what “modern people” recognise as a state, and why do I exclude indigenous people from said modern people? Who is saying this to you and why? Who is benefitting from you upholding these beliefs?
Sámi have their own government model (called Siida in northern sámi, Lapinkylä/Saamenkylä in Finnish) that is continuously getting rejected in favour of “”modernity”” - which also used to be a foreign way of life to all the natives of this land, including my own people. I only became “Finnish” due to my people assimilating into the majority.
“Again, tho, kudos to the Finns (suomalaiset?) for not turning the tables and attempting to do to others what was done to them.” - this isn’t true either, but my comment is already plenty lengthy so I won’t go into it. Just google “Suur-Suomi” if you want to learn more about this topic. What Finland did in Karelia is not a nice read. There is always more beneath the surface. Finnish nationalism has an extremely dark side.
(I hope this reply didn’t come off as aggressive or spiteful, as that is not my intention! I’m just very passionate on the subject and I like to educate people whenever I can about our history and politics.)
@@yondie491 CZcams keeps deleting/flagging my reply for some reason.. I'll have to try again later to see if the issue resolves itself. So this is both a placeholder comment and a test to see if there was something wrong with the comment itself. (You've said some things that are just not correct.)
Even the dividing lines between what we think of as well-established separate languages is blurrier than we think. I've seen conversations take place between Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese speakers where literally no one speaks the same "language" but there are zero comprehensibility problems, and it just looks like a perfectly normal conversation between three people.
And to be honest, I know that Scots people speak English fine, but when they talk to one another -- in English -- I can get maybe one word in ten, if I'm lucky. Otherwise, I can't even tell it's English. I've had the same experience of some very quick, very fluent backcountry American accents, and I'm American!
Heck, if you include dialects you can get into situations wherein people in the same country, speaking the same language, are mutually unintelligible.
Yea its similar with the Nordic languages. I'm Norwegian, I can understand Swedish and Danish just fine. But there are dialects within Norway that sound so different it confuses even me. Like the word "bread", in most of Norway its "brød", but just a bit north of where I live its "kake" which usually means "cake". In Swedish its also bröd. Does that mean Swedish is a dialect of Norwegian and that this Northern Trønder dialect is not?
Heck I sometimes jokingly call Norway's main written language Danish but with a Norwegian accent...its not that far from the truth, they are VERY similar.
Where does the line go?
@@zakuraRabbit I'm Danish, and there are people in northern Jutland who I sort of understand, and people in southern Jutland that I just straight up do not understand. Weirdly enough I speak Danish and German which it's sort of a hybrid of, but the phonetics and word choice just makes it unintelligible for me :p
@@op4000exe That brings up the question then: If they are mutually unintelligible, are they actually NOT dialects of a single language but separate languages? Where's the dividing line between dialect and language?
@@jcortese3300 That would be my argument too. Heck I'd argue that this would be the case as long as they're partially unintelligible even. Though with the caveat of that it can't just be one person speaking the language that you cannot understand.
Frisian is a official langues in The Netherlands, but over time less and less people speak it. And even thought it should be allowed to be in parliament, its rarely used.
The dutch goverment did put more effort and funds recently into preserving the frisian langues.
ngl i wanna learn frisian
Lmao I want to see someone speak in Frisian in parliament, that'd be fucking hilarious.
Honestly, I think many representatives wouldn't even understand it. Frisian isn't actually _that_ close to Dutch - in fact it's closer to English than it is to Dutch if I'm not mistaken.
@@Leyrann You are right. there was actualy a frisian speech not long ago in parliament.
It was actualy a black man who did the speech in frisian (he was adopted when he was a baby).
I like Frisian, I've been using it in writing for when I need a language that kinda sounds english but not really.
The Nederlands government should cut funding to english. The Nederlands embisy in England cant even speak standard nederlander let alone friesian.
The distinction between one language and another is deeply political. Arabic and Mandarin have mutually unintelligible speakers and are usually considered single languages, yet Serbo-croatian, scandinavian languages, and Malay which have high mutual intelligibility are split into multiple languages, mostly following national borders
I would say Scandinavian languages are different enough tho, yeah they have some intelligibility with each other but still they are quite different.
Also about the Malay, meanwhile both Malaysian and Indonesian standards are quite similar, there is several Malay dialects that are quite different from the 2 standards across the 4 countries.
@@KhiroKawasa Each of the Scandinavian lamguages have larger in-group variability rather than between-group varibility, far more than Arabic for example. As for Indonesian and Malay, I myself speak these languages and can assure you therr are larger differences between different dialects of Indonesian and Malay than there is between standard Indonesian and standard Malay. I know that weren't it for the politics involved, both languages would just be considered more like dialects of the same language
Arabic and Mandarin are in two completely different language families. That analogy is useless. A better comparison would be Hindi and French. They are very different languages, but they are in the same language family. The Scandinavian languages (by which I mean the Germanic languages of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland), which are sometimes mutually intelligible, are also in the same language family as Hindi and French.
@@AtarahDerek I meant Arabic and Mandarin each separately, not to the other
@@lesussie2237 There is no political division between Mandarin and Arabic because they are unrelated languages. They arose completely independently of one another's politics.
And here I thought the answer was going to be "Tolkien".
if conlangs were counted in the list, the number of total languages is definitely growing fast (many more people create conlangs than languages dying in a given amount of time)
@@suomeaboo Exactly. Conlangs should be counted in whatever census they take to count languages. At least, naturalistic conlangs (i.e. ones which are designed to appear like they could be an actual language; like Sindarin, and Na'avi, as opposed to say Ithkuil) should be counted.
@@cuitaro Yeah, but those conlangs were created for art projects. The ones which should be counted are those with a large speaker base such as Esperanto, or toki pona.
@@cuitaro uhh no... no they... they shouldn't?
@@vahkiel1042 i think conlangs that were only made to be use as art or word building or just any project in general that isn't used by a significant number of people shouldn't be counted like Ithkuil and the ones Tolkien made, but ones that are spoken and are growing like Esperanto or Toki Pona should
1:03 for Urdu and Hindi it's pretty much the other way around - linguists originally thought they were different languages but they are now described as one
I wonder if what you described with Arabic language is is anything similar to what is going on with Portuguese and Spanish?
I'd describe them (and Catalan, and a few others) as being a previous dialect continuum that is at a more advanced stage of divergence than Arabic.
Surprisingly no, most Spanish speakers from different countries can still understand each other. In fact, experts have noticed that, due to globalization and the internet, different Spanish dialects are converging and becoming more similar, especially in urban areas.
Linguriosa made a wonderful video on the topic. czcams.com/video/uOXycaJs0Ig/video.htmlsi=Kw-541We6EDzy8XU
@@gooseh4638 Portuguese isn't Spanish
@@StarBoy-fo5ig true but they have an almost 90% for lexical cognates which means almost everything can be understood between the two languages except for a few spelling and pronunciation differences among words.
@@StarBoy-fo5igNot by name, but it sounds like they're more mutually understandable than a lot of Arabic languages which until recently were considered the same language
It also probably helps that while it's been awhile since we stopped creating new spoken language, new sign languages are constantly being created and developed which would be such an interesting video in itself
At first I thought they started counting programming languages too 🧑💻
Same lol
I'm Canadian of Irish descent. I like speaking English and being able to communicate with so many people around the world but part of me wishes I was able to speak the language of my ancestors as well
Dia Duit!
Learning German, and wanting to learn Irish, for that reason.
Gaelic?
@@Chaos89P lol, which German. I insist Saxonish is a language not related to any of the languages surrounding it.
Never too late to learn. Just be patient and get lots of practice in real-world situations.
2:44 Oh no, why did you end your video with Ithkuil 😂
I've met two girls brought up speaking Lojban, but AFAIK no one is proficient in Ithkuil.
I wonder if at some point we'll start seeing new internet based languages.
we already see different social media platforms use things like tags or abbreviations to convey different things. And some platforms have terminology or memes that are brought to other platforms, like how english takes some words from french. Sometimes you can even tell what platforms a person uses based on how they communicate. I wish I was linguist cause this is all so fun to me.
@@stellart5664 skibidi
@@stellart5664 “Skibidi gyat Rizz? Fyam tax Messi Goated not fr 69 ohio. Plz Skibidi Rizz away”
Someone made the fundamentals for an "uwu" language back during quarantine, which is entirely based off of internet memes. Although, I don't think it's grown at all since its creation and I heavily doubt anyone's put much time into learning it. Surely interesting though...
I think we might see new languages created on the internet as hobbies or jokes. Klingon and High Valyrian are kind of similar in purpose, and they even have a very small number of speakers thanks to a few nerds on the internet. The issue is that creating a new language takes a lot of time, and there's no current reason to learn one other than amusement.
I'm certain our languages will change as a result of the internet and media, though. Our way of speaking has been drastically changed, and if the internet continues its growth, the changes will only expand. Entirely new internet languages probably won't be here for a while, but we don't really need them because it's already happening to existing languages.
Man, I really need to look into linguistics just a little, because this mess is so stupid but so fun and amazing at the same time
That is kind of what Viossa is
As a Sami, we have lost a lot of our language. There uses to be several different Sami languages, however only the big 3 are remaining, however even these 3 are under threath. Take northern Sami as an example. It's the most spoken out of all the Sami languages, however it's losing it's value. Words are forgotten, especially those that speak of nature and especially reindeer herding. A lot of Norwegian words are mixed in with the Sami language, and more and more words are forgotten about. So while i don't think the language will dissapear anytime soon, the words definetly are, and it's a shame, since the Sami language is a wordy language, with tons of different words describing nature
“The Sami language”? I don’t even speak a Sami language myself (though I am firmly of the belief that I should have grown up knowing at least some Pite Sami because not knowing the local language is atrocious), and it bothers me when North-Sami speakers refer to their language as _the_ Sami language.
@@ragnkja I didn't mean that it's THE Sami language, however i bunched all of the Sami languages together on this one as "one" language, because my points apply to all of the Sami languages
@@Girjon05
Still, whenever someone says “Sami [language]”, it’s almost always implied that it’s North-Sami, yet hardly anyone bothers to acknowledge that other Sami languages exist by specifying.
One really good way to preserve a language is to translate the Bible into it. Of course, that requires learning the target language PLUS Hebrew and Koine Greek. But if you're going to that effort anyway, you're already a linguist interested in preserving endangered languages.
@@AtarahDerek The Bible is translated to northern Sami, probably for some other Sami languages too
2:46 you thought you could sneak some ithkuil into your video without me noticing? I will start translating it now, be back in 10 years with the translation.
lol let me know when youve got it
@@selladore4911 "Clever girl". I should have guessed it from context.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to say that Yorok is 10,000 years old. It's like saying English is 6,000 years old, just because we can trace back English around that far back all the way to PIE
English might not be the best example, the amount of hybridization it's gone through is unusual.
@@LimeyLassen or French. Or Hindi. Or Russian. Or various Semetic languages that can be traced back even further.
Ultimately any spoken language seems to go back a very, very long time, while still being completely unintelligible between a 10,000 year gap
@@joshuahillerup4290I heard that Ancient & Modern Greek are still oddly similar.
@@spaghettiisyummy.3623 Probably because the Greeks venerate their ancient history. Thus they read it and the influence stays around in the language. English seems to have slowed its rate of change when Shakespeare and the King James Bible showed up.
@@spaghettiisyummy.3623 that’s only 2500 years, and is only the case because there was written Greek from 2500 years ago to act as a model for creating a standardised modern Greek (in place of all the highly divergent and changes dialects). 2:51
Veeeery small correction: Philippines not Phillipines at 0:45 onwards :)
It really should be written Filipines.
Great video
It's not just fully formed languages that go extinct, sometimes it's also dialects in a given language or slang from that language. Plus don't forget all the words for everyday objects we don't use anymore or lost insults, etc.
question..... if some makes a Conlang, and then get enough people to speak it would that add to the official count?
example if lots of folks learn Esperonto as the auxiliary tongue it was meant to be, or if enough enthusiastic Fans learn to be fluent in Elvish, or Vulcan, or Klingon, or some other fictional language..... would that count?
If enough people spoke the constructed language that it evolved into a natural language, yes.
I assume so, given that one of the examples in this video was considered to count again after being resurrected even though no person speaks it as a primary language
I mean there are native speakers of both Esperanto and toki pona so it's not that far from reality
Esperanto is in the ethnologue (which this video is about) so yes!
@@yarde.n native toki pona speakers?! you sure?
It has been a great pleasure discovering this effect on my own. I have been fascinated with Indo-European languages my whole life and over the years more and more dialects have turned into languages in their own regards. Then when we see the distinct features of the new language being closer to proto-indo-european we learn so much about our ancestors!
It's not very clear cut. There used to be a language called Serbo-Croat but since the break up of Yugoslavia we now have Serbian and Croatian. The same thing with Czech and Slovak although people across the former Czechoslovakia seem to understand each other pretty well. I was once in the Czech Republic with a Polish guy who was able to talk to local people in his own language with only the occasional word not being understood. I also heard someone from Southern Sweden and another from Southern Norway conversing with no difficulty whatsoever but they both said that they found it hard to understand people from Trondheim in Northwest Norway
There is the saying "a language is a dialect with an army", so categorizing something as a (separate) language is often a political thing.
I (a speaker of Standard German, born and living in Berlin) can easier understand Dutch (though it's clearly a different language) than people from Bavaria (in southern Germany) speaking their local dialect. And the local dialect of Lower German near the German-Dutch border is really close to the local dialect of Dutch on the other side.
For your examples:
→ Czech and Slovak were separate (but close) languages for centuries, then being in a common country (without being governed by Austrians on one side and Hungarians on the other) brought them even closer. (I heard that generally Slovak people understand Czech better than the other way around, which might be related to the size and different exposure to the other language.) Both are also somewhat close to Polish (these are the west-slavic language, together with some minority languages in Germany), but it depends on the person how easy you can converse.
→ Serbocroatian: The common identity of the people splintered on religious lines in the medieval and early modern period (catholic → croatian, orthodox → serbian, muslin → bosnian), which then caused the language to diverge. The founding of Yugoslavia after WW1 brought them together, but then the break apart caused them to diverge again. Nowadays each of the languages got new words the other ones didn't get.
→ Norwegian is actually two languages (Bokmal and Nynorsk), so having one of them being closer to Swedish than to the other is not too surprising.
I don’t know anything about Yurok, but there is no way it’s the same language as 10k years ago!
Proto indo europian was spoken only 6 thousand years ago.
Yeah, most languages are pretty unintelligible after only about 500 years. Even Icelandic from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible when spoken due to vowels and consonants shifting.
@@akl2k7 No. The average currently spoken language is 500 years old but they can remain inteligable for many centuries longer. Icelandic and old west norse are mutually inteligable, icelandic just has words for modern tech and more of a celtic accent, but can you not understand irish english?
@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 It's spelled "intelligible." How do you know an Icelander would understand a speaker of Old West Norse? Has anyone attempted to speak a reconstruction of it with an Icelander? Vowels have shifted just as much as other North Germanic languages, and a lot of consonants aren't even voiced anymore.
@@akl2k7 "It's spelled "intelligible."" According to english ortography the word /intəlid͡ʒəbl/ should be spelled 'intellidgibl'.
"How do you know an Icelander would understand a speaker of Old West Norse?" Because for starters back when old norse wasnt known scholars would read the runestones of Scandinavia in icelandic.
"Has anyone attempted to speak a reconstruction of it with an Icelander?" Yes! Professors who specialize in old norse love visiting Iceland and seeing that they can actually speak with people IRL the language theyve spent so much time studying academically.
"Vowels have shifted just as much as other North Germanic languages, and a lot of consonants aren't even voiced anymore." No. Likely largely because of german influence the languages of Scandinavia have changed a lot more than icelantic. Languages dont change at the same rate.
That fact that people made the afford to learn Yurok even though no one was speaking it and then proceeded to teach it to kids makes me so happy for some reason :D
So true . Im a lebanese and i can barely understand sudanese . Even though i refer to both as “arabic” . So i was shocked when i knew that the UK or USA alone “have different accents”
As a Sudanese person, I can NOT understand a morrocan or libyan or Algerian Arabic dialect, but I easily understand Egyptian Arabic as there are many similarities, but an Algerian person for example, can understand morrocan, Libyan, and even Egyptian, but not Sudanese Arabic
2:46
yo can someone write a whole paragraph explaining what that last language says
and yes, one paragraph, it looks like Ithkuil, and I'm scared.
Ancient languages are vital as they are the key to constructing newer languages. Let's appreciate every single one of them!❤🎉
1:30 but are those giraffes diverse enough to not be able to have children?
or are they just different breeds?
Not being able to have children isn't what defines a population as a species, biologically speaking.
Not breeding regularly, due to any number of factors, is what separates populations into different species, and that is where a lot of the fuzziness comes from.
This is partially because animals get extremely diverse while still being technically able to have fertile hybrids.
If we were to use a strict species definition, the genus Canis would have a single species in it, orchids might be reduced from one of the most diverse families of plants in the world to a fraction of their former diversity, and even horses and donkeys would have to be redefined as a single species, because fertile mules do exist, they're just extremely rare.
edit; to be clear, i favor a morphological species concept, I just meant that the populations which we want to capture as different in our species definitions are those which mostly don't interbreed, like wolves and coyotes.
@@griffinhunter3206 Poop balls!!!
There is a lot more fame and fortune in discovering a new species then there is in finding more instances of someone else's species.
This is the main factor in why people who don't respect quantitative science, such as @griffinhunter3206, discount or ignore the biological definition of species.
When it comes to present world taxonomy, the ability to make fertile offspring is the only way to consistently and meaningfully define species.
@@griffinhunter3206 Your fluid and non-rigorous approach to taxonomy is really bothering me.
What is the explanatory or practical benefit of your alternative definition of species?
I feel you are just raising sanctimonious conjecture.
Obviously we can declare any system as unobjective if we try hard enough, but doing so doesn't explain anything.
Obviously the concept of species is a human made artifact not a physical property like charge or mass.
Clearly, all breeds of dogs and wolves are the same species.
Horses and donkeys are different species and have different numbers of chromosomes.
Since the beginning of reliable animal husbandry records in 1527 there have only been 60 reported fertile mules and evidence suggests these rare animals did not have 63 chromosomes as other mules do.
To expand on what griffinhunter said, this is a definition that is in the process of changing. The definition you're using is called the "Mayr's species concept" and was proposed by Ernst Mayer in 1942. It's what you'll find in most dictionaries, but it has broken down for the reasons griffinhunter mentioned, among others.
One of the clearest examples is humans. Species of humans like Neanderthal and Denisovan branched off long before modern humans and were morphologically very distinct from humans. But despite being VERY clearly different species, we have their distinct DNA in us today because they regularly interbred with our ancestors.
Another example is what are called "ring species" where a species or set of species over a broad area can interbreed with their nearest neighbors, but not with their more distant neighbors. eg. Bird A can breed with bird B, and bird B can breed with bird C but bird A can't breed with bird C.
So scientists are pushing for a new definition that is more useful. What gfiffinhunter mentioned is one of those, though I will caution that you may hear others due to the fuzziness mentioned.
I am a native speaker of arabic and I feel that you misunderstand the difference between arabic dialects and seperate languages.like everyone in the middle east and egypt fully understands each other and even places outside the middle east I can understand extremly well saying omani arabic and saudi arabic are different languages is like saying people in new york and people in texas speak seperate languages. And saying people from egypt and people from libya speak different languages is like saying us and uk speak different languages.
But what you said wasnt full false there are some places the speak arabic that is different to how others do its pretty tough to understand. Its like you trying to understand an irishmen living in a rural remote area. These people somewhat blur the line between dialect and language
The concept you and the video are talking about is called mutual intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility is itself a spectrum. Many European languages like Danish and Norwegian have a similar or higher level of mutual intelligibility than say Arabic spoken in Moracco compared to Arabic spoken in Jordan but are still considered separate languages. If we want to keep similar standards for differentiating languages, then we either have to call Norwegian and Danish the same language or we have to call the varieties of Arabic different languages.
@@goclbert I agree with you on some point mutual intelligability between a jordian and morrocan is pretty weak
So there is an arguement on whether or not they are seperate languagess(thats for lingiutists to deside as I dont know the full extent of there differrences)
My point was that the video was far too hyperbolic with arabic and failed to see the distintiom between arabic dialects accents and languages
Yeah but we all can Speak the same traditional Arabic, that's how I met a friend from Morocco even though I'm from Iraq
The point is that linguists consider arabic "dialects" different languages and they're counted separately in the ethnologue count of languages which is what the video is about
People in San'a (Yemen) struggle understand people in Mukalla (also Yemen).
This probably was not brought up because of the current situation, but Hebrew used to be extinct, yet now a great number of people speak it as revival
Not extinct as such but carried on as a liturgical and scholastic language, in much the same way as were both Latin and Sanskrit.
@@pattheplanter Ah right! Thanks for the correction
1:23 by this argument English also doesn’t count as one single language since there is tons of dialects, some which has a huge difference from the standard! Is that sounds right to you?
Scots is the northern most dialect of english and is not inteligable to most english speakers, south iland newzeelandic is how scotish highlanders learned english after being deported and they speak it in a way that is uninteligable to most speakers of english.
All the English dialects are well intelligible though.
@@vpvnsf not all but yes most of them are, that’s also goes for Arabic dialects. Almost every Arab can understand other dialect as long as they’re not mixing words from other language which Moroccan and Algerian and Tunisian dialects do
@@Fatimahmuath I don't know man, I can understand most dialects of English, that aren't something like Taglish or Spanglish. Other than that, the accents are the only problem here.
@@vpvnsf I’m Arab myself and I understand every Arabic dialect - except for magharibi dialects for the same reason I said earlier - and it’s bothering me hearing westerners say my language isn’t one single language when they don’t even speak it and know nothing about it.. as if we’re politically dividing is not enough they now attempt to divide our language the only thing that still unite us.. I might be dramatic I don’t know
This is a great example of the script following a prescribed path even though the data doesn’t support the claim that the video was planned to make.
Wow, what a coincidence. Yurok is one of the few tribes I actually know. Had no idea they even had their own language. You don't get that impression, visiting klamath or klamath glen.
As a conlanger I am doing my part to increase this number
Like Former Yugoslovia croat,bosniak,serb
or
Assamese,Bengali,Rohingya
Or
German & Austrian
Are different language because of political or mutual hatered
Austrian is not a language
Completely agree, there isnt even one distinct Austrian dialect. @@Polska_Edits
@@Polska_Edits Austrian is a language, you might know it under the name beyrish.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 what
1:21 As a native Arabic speaker, I feel obligated to correct something here. Most of these are dialects. *NOT* separate languages. I speak Kuwaiti Arabic, but that's just a dialect. I can perfectly understand Omani Arabic, Hijazi Arabic, Levantine Arabic, and so on, even though I was never taught them. However, if you move far enough to the northwest of Africa, you do start to get dialects that are very very different than those in the middle east. But most Arabic speakers still consider that Arabic even though they barely understand it.
What's the barrier between a language and a dialect?
I think there's something similar as to what you describe with Spanish, Catalan, and French. Spanish and French speakers can't usually understand each other that well, but Catalan speakers can usually understand both.
Not sure if something similar happens between the borders of the rest of Europe, this is the only one I've heard.
Isn't that called a dialect continuum?
Nice to see a fellow Kuwaiti 🇰🇼🫡
@@pe1ucas There's no hard line. Norwegian Swedish and Danish are some variety of intelligible, and for English the determination of Scots as a Dialect or Language is a debate in its own right.
From what I observed, most linguist will agree with minute earth, that there are arabic lamguages instead of dialects. But a subgroup of them takes into account on how people think of the languages, the socio-linguists. So for them they will continue to consider Arabic as one language.
Generally, linguists and laypeople alike consider two different speech as dialects if there is a substantial mutual intelligibility between the speakers of those two speeches. It is a very vague criteria since 1) intelligibility is not always symmetric 2) it is actually a spectrum, a case of sorites paradox.
I would disagree with minute earth about hindi and urdu being categorically two different languages but I will agree with their opinion on arabic.
As long as we have records to the dying languages we can still revive it
True, but it's hard to document enough of a rare dying language without missing out on important parts.
@@raizin4908take Latin for example
Or as a more serious reply of a language that does still currently have speakers, the Zuñi Pueblo language isolate was documented by a missionary. Unfortunately, colonization by Christians replaced a lot of words and he only recorded a small niche wordset. Like, throw away the 250k English dictionary and now you only have access to words used in the Bible. Intentional obfuscation is one of the terrible notes in the song of subverting a culture.
This niche also shows up in professionals or academics who spend time abroad. They may not be conversational in a language, but can identify professional words such as the Chinese words for gluconeogenesis and microscope.
But why would we?
And not really, there is a great difference between a native speakaers sense of langauge and the language sense of someone who learned a dead languge from texts.
While the revival efforts for a language like Yurok may one day save the language, it's transmission that defines a language, not simply having living proficient speakers, or else Latin would be considered a living language. Basically, a language is only really "alive" if you have living L1 speakers, that is, people who acquired the language during primary language acquisition. They don't need to have acquired it from parents/caregivers who are also L1 speakers, though, which is why teaching kids how to speak it in school is a great and probably necessary step. That said, it's more important to keep the language culturally relevant, because if those kids who learn it in high school don't speak it at home when they grow up, their children won't grow up as native speakers.
That matches one of my theories on the title. I have come up with two more, one is that militaries are inventing new languages so the enemy has no clue what they are saying, the other is sci-fi has invented languages which fans decide to learn how to speak.
So I'm Australian, but cant understand a word spoken in thick Scottish. Can barely understand a guy at work with some sort of dialect in England. Are they considered 3 different languages, or just English, like the Arabic example?
It depends on why you can't understand them - lack of understandability can be driven by accents rather than true dialect differences, and Scottish English on paper isn't very different to Australian English
I can get why its sad if the languages die out but in a world of internationalisation where some people refuse to speak/cant speak I really wish there would be only 1 language in the world
How to tell if Yurok had been spoken 10 000 years? That would be extremely long age for a language, especially without written records.
He cant tell he just baselessly assumed.
Yurok tribes are 10,000 years old, sure it's correlation not causation, but it's the best assumption we can make.
@@vpvnsf No thats not the best asumption we can make. English and my language diverged 5000 years ago, so with 5000 years of seperate development each the difference should be about 10 000 years, so if you think joruk as spoken today was the same language as was spoken by their ancestors 10 000 years earlyer nu tad tev nevajadzētu būt nemazākajām grūtībām saprast manu valodu. Dzīvas valodas mainās, pieņemt ka kāda nemainījās tūkstošiem gadu nav labs pieņēmums, pat seno norvēģu un islandiešu valodas nav tādas pašas vienalga ka tās ir savstarpēji saprotamas.
Meanwhile, the number of known species keeps rising even while we are observing worrying level of mass extinction. I won't be surprised if both species and languages are doing the same numbers game.
I bet is just new “discovered” before they are gone…
Sorry, but I kinda can’t get over the misspelling of “Philippines” at 0:45. >_
I have my own language set up, but it won't be revealed till I have my own country in the future (hopefully)
Languages are also constantly evolving. Like right now I speak English that has very noticeably differences compared to the English I was taught.
I feel conflicted. This video starts off by talking about one of the languages from my neck of California, you know how rare it is to hear someone talk about the tribes here? That's cool, but it sad being reminded another one of the languages died out.
I wonder about languages that diverge into more languages…
at 2:47
that looks like it says: "help"
Clever girl*
Sooo.. As an English speaker, I can barely understand the "English" of some of the folks in some obscure places in Scotland or Ireland..
Using the same example as the Arabic, what does this mean for the 2 very different "English" languages?
The best examples for English are Gullah and Scots (not Scottish English or Scottish Gaelic but Scots) which are sometimes considered separate from English and sometimes considered dialects of it.
"PHILLIPINES" - it's spelt Philippines
You are right, that was my mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.
I never spelt it correctly, not even once. Why not make it “Felipeans” instead?
I hate that place 🥱🙄
We latvieši just write Filipīnas. The spanish kings name was Filip not Pilip.
My cousins made up a language last year, nobody in the family knows what they are yapping about now
Nice, my conlang made the count increase.
"separately evolving groups" versus "species" are two different things. There are historically dozens of "separately evolving" human populations, but it is a rather bold claim to say that any of them are at the species level. Even groups that are now likely extinct are considered "archaic Sapiens" suggesting that the scientific consensus is that both these groups and the earliest diverging lineages of modern humans are part of the same species as everyone else. Indeed, if we want a particularly extreme example we can look at "the muddle in the middle." Where Homo Erectus is used to include 2 million years of human evolution across multiple continents with a doubling in brain size during that period.
Remind me of the coastline paradox….
We like to preserve old things. I think it's for our innate fear of full death, that being, being forgotten. So we want to save as much information as possible, i.e. dying languages. But maybe we should also recognise that it's the way of things. Yes, thousands of year old languages are being forgotten each year, but that has been happening for thousands of years! There is an untold number of forgotten languages. And on the other hand more are being discovered each year, some just as old or even older. And add to that the fact that we're not done creating new languages. Conlangs and real ones are born each year, as well
Is Valyrian from ASOIAF Quenya and Sindarin LOTR considered official language?
So basically what happened was we had a puzzle piece which turned out to be made of puzzle pieces... Does English have that? Bc thats more of dialects rather than a separate language?
Well the example about arabic always gets something wrong and is also highly politicized; whats really the case is more complicated than that:
1. Arabic is a diglossia, there is standard arabic, which includes arabic read in the qur'an, religious purposes in general, newspapers and news broadcasts, TV, cartoons, dubs and subs, speeches, school education and high education, UI, literature, etc.
And there is colloquial arabic which are the dialects and slang that are used in everyday communication, texting, entertainment, etc.
Standard and colloquial arabic are intellgible but its more one sided as all colloqial-standard divides are in all languages, thats why foreigners learning standard arabic often struggle with colloquial one, despite it seeming intuitive to us natives because colloquial arabic is still overwhelmingly arabic words, many of which are among the most common used in standard too (but foreign learners may not easily catch this at first), its just that we take shortcuts with things like pronunciation and grammar, and other shortcuts, also the use of certain phrases and expressions, and some suffixes/prefixes. But overall being a diglossia meaning you grow up with both colloquial and standard, which also means the distinction between both can get porous in practice, since both are the same language there is no explicit rule to how much standard you can insert within colloquial (but if you do this in mundane speak you will sound either silly, or pretentious). It feels more protective the other say around not letting colloquial seep into standard but it happens sometimes for a number of reasons.
2. Dialect contiuum: when it comes to colloquial arabic, its divided into mashriqi (east) and maghribi (west) with the dividing line being somewhere in libya. Eastern dialects have a slight contiuum going from egypt to levant to arabia but are mutually intellegible among each other, not only that, theyre also intelligible to maghrebis, thid especially due to cultural reasons like egyptian cinema making the egyptian dialect understandable for everyone, syrian dubs of turkish drama and general levantine representation in other stuff, saudi cultural exports especially on the internet in the early 2010s when they took over arab yoitube, etc.
Maghrebi dialects are very mutually intellegible among each other too but are less acessible to outsiders, theyre still understandable (speaking from a pov of a mashriqi) but you cant mimic them basically. This is less because of the non arab (mostly french) expressions used, most of it is still arab; its just because of unfamiliarity of some the structure mashriqis are used to in their colloquials, you can still point out to arabic words and maghrebu affixes individually when its written out (btw i have fun sometimes listening to videos of maghrebis because even though i do understand it, its stimulating enough)
Hope this cleared out some of the misconceptions a bit!
The point of language is to communicate with other humans and understand the world around you. It is a GOOD thing when a language goes extinct because it means that more people are speaking a language that they can use to speak with more people and read/learn more things
Do you not think there is anything of cultural value lost when a language dies or do you just think it is greatly outweighed by the utility?
Okay, British person.
Of course, there are also new constructed languages, but linguists often are a bit reluctant to accept these.
mrmryrwrk' is still my most favourite word of all the langauges.
Makes me wonder about Elvish, Klingon, and Esperanto...how many languages are being created?
An absurd amount, which is probably why they were specifically talking about languages with native speakers - though that would probably still count Elvish, Klingon, and Esperanto, since I have heard of kids that got brought up on their local language and Klingon.
@@Autoskip I've heard about the same thing for Esperanto. Not sure what these kids think of the idea when they grow up...
@@nathanbanks2354 Most Esperanto native speakers have at least two native languages, and how well it works depends a lot on how the parents are doing it. (There are even some "dynasties" of 4th-generation native speakers.)
(Though I know at least one who started out with just Esperanto, and got their second language (English) only with 3 years. When I spoke to them (already as an adult), they still were somewhat angry at their parents for that.)
Generally, the Esperanto native speakers ("denaskuloj") are not considered the model of how to use the language, and after a few years of active practice, I got to a better language level than some of them (at least grammar-wise, my vocabulary was of course focused on other fields).
Siavosh language is so unknown and so few people speak it and I think that there are only 15 people left who can speak it
honestly, I'm more against reviving dead languages because less languages generally means more people speaking the same languages, thus making more understanding and agreement between cultures.
If you ever need to find out where North is and your hand a northern and southern giraffe, you can let them walk around a bit, not observe them so they become probability fields and then observe them and repeat a few times and then there’s a high likelihood you find north by the positions of the giraffes relative to each other. That’s the trick they used in airplanes until Rutherford invented the new atom on 1911. (probably the right year)
1:02 this example isn't accurate. Here it's the opposite case. People think Hindi and Urdu are different languages but they're actually different registers of the same language.
I wonder if this is a similar pattern found in ASD diagnosis incidence.
Funnily enough and to some, unfortunately, ASD is an instance of the opposite. In the past, ASD was categorised into 4 varieties (including the infamous Asperger's), but in more recent years, all of those separate diagnoses officially became one thing: ASD.
@@chaoskiller6084I think they're talking in the much looser sense of how the incidence of overall ASD diagnosis has skyrocketed recently (which is both true and likely due to this discovery effect - recent correction of historical under diagnosis)
@bosstowndynamics5488 Thank you, that's exactly what I was asking. I wonder if the incidence is rising because more people are identified with ASD, more people actually develop ASD, some other reason, or a mixture.
@@dejesusrussell That's almost certainly the case because people are more aware of it now, so they're more likely to seek screenings for ASD and other conditions, that's why the diagnosis rate has skyrocketed, rather than more people actually being born with it.
@@chaoskiller6084 I'd love to read studies on this. Do you have any recommendations?
How many distinct English languages are there?
At least 3. UK, US, and the rest of the world
Only one, I think. But there are countless creoles and pidgins.
As many as there are English speakers depending where you draw the line.
English is a language made of hybridisation.
There are tons of distinct English based languages.
Old English (original), middle English (french influence), modern English(french, Norse, German, danish, Latin and multiple others influence), Scots (old English with gaelic influence)
And multiple others exist that I can't name off the top of my head.
(This is not including dialects like American English or Scottish English as I don't really consider them different languages)
@@Yorick257Australian and UK English are close enough to be dialects, formal Australian English is probably closer to formal UK English than even some UK dialects. Even American English is probably (spelling aside) a lot closer to UK English than other English dialects like Singaporean English or South African English
warlpiri mentioned 🎉
don't worry, soon we will have the java script problem
where people will say: "why are there so many languages? we need one that does everything"
so they make a new language that 'does everything'
now there is one more language.
so others will say: "why are there so many languages? we need one that does everything"
I feel like having less languages yet more people is a good thing. It means we can all understand more % of the population and it gets us a but closer to one true universal language
Why would we want a univeral language? I much like foreigners being unable to interdict in my peoples political debates.
Why would losing languages be a good thing? Losing languages means that the cultures that the languages was intertwined with are also being lost.
Also from this comment it's very obvious that you're lazy to learn more langauges to understand more people.
@@tovarishcheleonora8542 Not really? I mean sure to an extent it could work but come on a language might be unique and diverse but losing it is nothing to cry over. The culture is still there just being spoke in a way thats different than the original. Change doesn’t delete culture. Also mate no one wants to learn 4 different languages at most just to be able to communicate
@@krisspychissp Jokes on you Im currently learning my forth language.
It’s Philippines…..
Hebrew is one of the few examples of a language being revived on a national scale
Colloquial hindustani IS still one language and always have been. When Pakistan and India seperated, the government forcefully changed the form and literary languages to be different.
In India it was Bollywood
So, would it be fair to think that instead of one dead language, we might have lost a few, just because we didn't knew it good enough? I mean, it is a thought with maybe no value, but even if they were dialects, the different words and different meaning for some words, are just too precious to not be known. I know it is part of everything, but I don't like extinctions.
I love how the Philippines was misspelled. It always amuses me how people struggle to spell that word and it's demonym.
How do new languages evolve?
Over a very very long time people start speaking differently. Like how America and the UK now speak differently but the first British settlers spoke like Brits. Give that a few hundred more years with not a lot of direct interaction and you get separate languages. Latin used to be one language but over time people started speaking differently in different regions. Now we have Spanish, Italian, Romanian, French, a whole bunch more languages.
Me and two friends made our own language its called No man Language. Where still planning changing it since thats not creative or ogrinal. Where the only ones who know it so ig My languge our languge is official
me looking at video thumbnail: conlang?
Didn't know that I was super multilingual since I understand most of those arabic "languages".
So dialects are just diffrent languages?
Unangam tunuu still has some living speakers and only went extinct in Russia
sina toki pi toki pona ala :(
Dang I thought this was gonna be about conlangs
The Netherlands has two official languages. Can you name them?
Thing is, several regions in the Netherlands now want their regional accent to be recognized as a language 🤷 so the "new language" thing makes me wonder ...
Dutch and frisian?
My native language of Acadien isn't on the list yet
What qualifies as a language or dialect is fuzzy. Not saying you can't distinguish em, but usually you gotta apply several asterisks and exceptions. Languages are fuzzy and don't fit into neat little boxes because we want them to. They are messy and weird. Even the widely spoken ones have features that make classifying them kinda weird. Not always to a gamebreaking level, but it is fuzzy nonetheless.
For example, is Scots a separate language or just a dialect from other forms of English? Should dialectal continuums be considered all separate languages, one language, a mix of both options? Are Cantonese and Mandarin really both the same language of "Chinese" if they aren't mutually intelligible. And conversely, are Portuguese and Spanish more "same-language"-y because there's more overlap? And what about asymmetric mutual intelligibility, like with Swedish, Danish, and Norweigan where they can sometimes understand each other but not in equal ways like when one speaker might understand the written language more than the spoken one? Does mutual intelligibility even matter? Should grammar be the deciding factor?
Idk man, Im just an amateur linguistics nerd who probably doesn't even fully understand what I'm saying to the greatest capacity. But it's undeniable that languages are not all easy to separate into clean boxes.
Very good example with Arabic as an Algerian it's very unlikely that a middle eastern understand our language
the power of conlangs
Is cockney its own language?
85 million Cantonese speakers in the world and this language is still disappearing within a decade because of the politics and authority speak Mandarine.
We are living before the fall. Embrace it!
So dialects are languages now?
A dialect is a language of its own
Given that our planet is globalizing and homogenizing as we work towards a universal language (English most probably), isn't the idea of learning dead languages conflicts with it? What is the reason for us to study language if we're not to use it to communicate? I find it strange that we want to have both diversity and homogenity at the same time.
Language is not just for communication, it's also for expressing yourself, and transporting culture.