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The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Over a thousand known languages were spoken by various peoples in North and South America prior to their first contact with Europeans. These encounters occurred between the beginning of the 11th century (with the Nordic settlement of Greenland and failed efforts in Newfoundland and Labrador) and the end of the 15th century (the voyages of Christopher Columbus).
Cherokee is one of the few, or perhaps the only, Native American language with an increasing population of speakers, [119] and along with Navajo it is the only indigenous American language with more than 50,000 speakers, [120] a figure most likely achieved through the tribe's 10-year long language preservation plan involving growing new ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
In early studies of linguistics in the 1920s, it was incredibly common for an American linguist to focus on grammar and structure of languages native to North America, such as Chippewa, Ojibwa, Apache, Mohawk, and many other indigenous languages. Due to the origins of the study, there is extensive information on the dialects and structure of ...
In American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Lyle Campbell describes various pidgins and trade languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. [20] Some of these mixed languages have not been documented and are known only by name. Medny Aleut (Copper Island Aleut) Chinook Jargon; Broken Slavey (Slavey ...
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. [1] It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages.
American English and British English (BrE) often differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary, and, to a much lesser extent, grammar and orthography. The first large American dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, known as Webster's Dictionary, was written by Noah Webster in 1828, codifying several of these ...