Why is different languages

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us on today's topic. Adrian Dec 12, Is it because they don't know or they just don't add it. Tessa Dec 12, Im so glad wonderopolis is here because I wouldn't know all this stuff. Jordan m Dec 12, I know some spanish like soy jordan which is my name is jordan. Very good, Jordan m! Darrel J Dec 12, I wish i could speak many languages. Amelia L. Dec 12, Good afternoon, Amelia L.!

H Dec 12, I like the wonder it was really interesting and i can talk many languages too. McKinsie H. Hi Wonderopolis! Brook D Dec 12, Hello wonderopolis i can speak different langeuges like aloha and si and amego but that not all by wonderopolis.

Thanks Brook. Simon C Dec 12, I can only speak one language, I wish I could speak more!!! Gwen H. Great story! I can speak a little bit of spanish, but I think it's easier to just make up your own language!!!! Hi Gwen H.! It's like in movies when people have secret codes! Probably a long time, elijah! Alexander Dec 12, I can speak many languages including roman and greek. That's great, Alexander! DeRpY-Chan Dec 12, Kon'nichiwa, genkidesuka! S Why do you never put the capital letters in my name for DeRpY?

Meeka Dec 12, I loved this one. It was pretty good. The languages are countless! Darrien Mrs. Liles Class Dec 12, I think they should try to find different types of languages. Brandon Mrs. If there are so many languages why don't most of the people in some country's use those languages when they talk to people.

Daija G Dec 12, Is it true that the earliest people were the cave men and that the spoke their own language back then because they did not know how to talk like us today i WONDER. Breven Dec 12, R Dec 12, Hello Eden. Just remember, practice makes perfect! Landon A. I to was thinking about the languages. It really weird, why can't there be one language? I can speak about three languages.

Harlee W. Do you know how to speak in diffrent languages i know how to speak spanish i try through. Sierra Dec 12, Why are there so many languagese? Why did you choose to write about launguage? How hard do you think it would be to speak around 7, languagase? Emma Dec 12, Each time, I noticed that the language of the conversation would change from an indigenous language to something they knew I could understand, Bislama or English. Thirty people had gathered for the workshop on this island in the South Pacific, and all except for me came from the island, called Makelua, in the nation of Vanuatu.

They lived in 16 different communities and spoke 16 distinct languages. In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community. Yet the residents of each village spoke completely different languages.

According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History , this island, just kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps 40 different indigenous languages.

Why so many? We could ask this same question of the entire globe. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7, distinct languages. And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.

For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?

As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates. Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions.

The questions also seem like they should be fundamental to many academic disciplines — linguistics, anthropology, human geography. But, starting in , when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.

These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location. Once a group of people settled in a place, they were often isolated apart from other groups. On the other hand, people did sometimes learn and borrow some words from other groups.

For example, people speaking different languages might meet to trade, or were forced to leave home and move closer to another group because of war.

Over long periods of time, then, both things—isolation and a little mixing—helped create so many languages. Languages are related, just like family members are. So when speakers of a single language separate and travel to different places, the single language can become two or more languages over time. Take the example of Latin. When Latin speakers split up and spread themselves around Europe, their Latin turned into languages like French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

English was born in the same way. In the fifth century, powerful Germanic tribes those Angles, Saxons and Jutes left their European homelands and invaded Britain. The Absaroka coyote story points to how people with different languages might misunderstand or disagree with one another. Language is often connected to our identity. Along with travelling to different places, identity is another thing that can lead to language change or different languages.

For instance, in one village in Papua New Guinea a country just north of Australia , everyone spoke the same language, Selepet, as people in nearby villages. This way, their version in Selepet would be different bunge from the typical Selepet word for no bia , and would represent the proud identity of the village. Read more: Curious Kids: Why does English have so many different spelling rules?