Readings on Chapter 13

This weeks readings were all about how language has changed over time. Language is a very clear and accurate indicator of what happened in world history. Language is the evidence that, for instance, there were massive migrations from Central Asia to Europe in 4000 B.C. The ancestral language is linked to that particular culture and society.



The information on Polynesians and their protolanguage was very interesting. It was beneficial to learn that Polynesia formed a language family and there were 5 'daughter' languages that are subordinate to the 'parent language' of Proto-Polynesian. The way in which all of the languages evolved as shown in tables 13-1 and 13-2 was surprising in some aspects. It seems some parts of the language evolved and changed quite a bit and in other areas the language stayed virtually the same.



Another surprising fact that I learned when reading the chapter is that Chinese is spoken by 1.2 billion people and English comes in at 325 million people. It was also interesting to read about the people of Papua New Guinea, and that it is a nation of 5.4 million people with more than 800 languages that are spoken. It makes me wonder what exactly constitutes a language in that respect. If only two people in the world spoke a certain language, is it still a language? I would still think that it is a language and that the number of interlocutors does not change the fact that it is a language. It is interesting to think about for sure.

There are some implications for teaching within this chapter and that is languages are always changing. (I got this idea from Kurt on one of the discussion boards. Thanks Kurt!) Finally, knowing that languages belong to a specific family may enable students to tap into their background knowledge.