Languages of the world: An introduction by Asya Pereltsvaig (review)
- Languages of the world: An introduction by Asya Pereltsvaig
The book Languages of the world: An introduction is about “diverse human languages and the peoples who speak them, how these languages came to be spoken where they are now spoken, how they interacted and changed each other” (p. 3). Intended to be used as a textbook for a course of the same name that the author teaches at Stanford University, the book aims to provide students with an introduction to the diversity and typology of human languages around the world.
The book offers detailed information about the vast variety of the world’s languages. Pereltzvaig explains how specific language families are components of [End Page 91] larger and more extensive families and can be traced back to ancestral or protolanguages. The author details numerous similarities and differences among languages and illuminates how the study of human language is increasingly enhanced by evidence from other disciplines such as anthropology, archeology, history, and genetics.
Pereltsvaig finds Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1916 definition of language as “a product of the collective mind of linguistic groups” to be insufficient in clarifying the borders of languages since it does not definitively determine the membership of any linguistic group. As a result, she devotes most of chapter 1, “Introduction”, to the presentation of an appropriate definition of language. A general geopolitical definition is adopted to refer to the languages spoken in different countries, for example, Serbo-Croatian’s division into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. However, due to the discrepancies that are found between linguistic and geopolitical divisions, the criterion of “mutual intelligibility” is taken as the yardstick against which different languages are definitively judged: “if two linguistic varieties are mutually intelligible, they are considered dialects of the same language, and if they are not, they constitute distinct languages” (p. 4). The taxonomy of languages is discussed from the level of dialects to the level of language families.
Chapter 2, “Indo-European languages”, examines the languages of Eurasia and demonstrates how the historical studies of many linguists have lead to the conclusion that these languages descended from a common ancestral language; Proto-Indo-European. The chapter discusses various theories about the origin of the Indo-European languages and the reasons behind their expansion and diversification.
Chapter 3, “Non-Indo-European languages of Europe and India”, examines the languages spoken in Europe and India that are not of Indo-European descent. Pereltsvaig discusses how the grammatical, morphological, and phonological patterns of non-Indo-European languages led to the identification of the Finno-Ugric and Dravidian language families, and of the Basque language. The author demonstrates that, despite their differences, the languages within these families share certain grammatical characteristics.
Chapter 4, “Languages of the Caucasus”, analyzes the more than 100 languages spoken between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Three language families are discussed as particular to this region: Northwest, Northeast, and South Caucasian (or Kartvelian). In this chapter Pereltsvaig notes the significance of field linguistics in documenting endangered and little-known languages such as those of the Caucasus region.
Chapter 5, “Languages of Northern Africa, Middle East, and Central Asia”, and chapter 6, “Languages of sub-Saharan Africa”, discuss characteristics common to the languages of these regions such as the use of tone and pitch to indicate lexical or grammatical meaning. The author also points to the importance of this region as the origin of the emergence of human language, and notes that the linguistic diversity of the area makes it particularly worthy of close study.
Chapter 7, “Languages of eastern Asia”, challenges the historically held belief that all of the region’s languages descended from Classical Chinese. The various Asian languages are demonstrated to belong to three separate families: Sino-Tibetan, [End Page 92] Austro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai. The author argues that contact among these languages had caused grammatical similarities that had lead to the conclusion that they originated from the same ancestral language. In this chapter Pereltsvaig also discusses three eastern Asian languages; Japanese, Korean, and Ainu...
