back to the 211 main page
Linguistics 211: Languages of the World
LING 211: Languages of the World Winter 2007
Scott DeLancey
346-3901
Straub 227
delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Details about assignments and useful references and Web sites can
be found on the 211 Web page:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/courses/211/211.html
Course Outline
Jan 8 What is a language?
How many languages are there in the world? Where
do languages come from? What's the difference
between a "language" and a "dialect"? Who speaks
dialects?
10 Genetic relationships and language isolates
What does it mean to say that two languages are
related? How do we discover language
relationships? What is a "Language family"?
12 Typological and areal relationships
What are some of the ways that languages can vary?
Why are neighboring languages often very similar,
even when they aren't related?
15 Martin Luther King Day -- No Class
17 Language extinction
How and why do languages die out? What are the
prospects for preserving endangered languages?
19 How languages spread--the Indo-European family
22 The Indo-European languages
Indo-European includes English and almost all of
the languages of Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, and
most of the languages of northern India and
Bangladesh.
24 Uralic languages
Uralic includes Finnish and Hungarian, among other
languages that you've never heard of.
26 Altaic, Paleosiberian
The other languages of northern Asia
29 Sino-Tibetan languages
A family which includes Chinese, Tibetan, and
Burmese
31 Language Areas of Eurasia
Feb 2 Southeast Asian language families
The linguistic affiliations of Thai, Lao,
Cambodian, Vietnamese, and other languages of
mainland Southeast Asia
5 Oceanic languages
The Austronesian family (Indonesian, Samoan,
Hawaiian, many others) and languages of Australia
& Papua-New Guinea
7 Dravidian languages of southern India
9 Afroasiatic languages
The Semitic languages, Ancient Egyptian, and other
languages of northern and eastern Africa
Monday, February 12 FIRST MIDTERM
14 Other families of Africa
Khoisan, Nilotic, and Niger-Kordofanian
16 Languages of the Americas
19-21 South & Meso-American languages
23 Meso-American & North American familes
26 Ancient stocks of western North America
The "Hokan" and "Penutian" languages of Oregon and
California
Feb 28-Mar 2 Native languages of Oregon
Monday, March 5 SECOND MIDTERM
Mar 7 Signed languages (and "sign language")
American Sign Language and other signed languages
used in Deaf communities
9 Pidgins & Creoles
The spontaneous creation of languages out of old
materials
12 Borrowing & language mixture
How languages trade words, sounds, and grammatical
patterns
14 Linguistic paleontology--Prehistory of Indo-European
What can linguistic evidence tell us about the
world before the invention of writing?
16 Linguistic paleontology--Languages of western North
America
Course requirements:
1) Two short writing assignments (see below)
2) Two midterm exams, Feb. 12 and March 5.
3) A term paper: A 3,000-5,000 word research paper on a
language or language family of your choice. See the
Web page for some resources to get started with. You
should come to talk to me about a topic early in the
term.
The term paper is due NO LATER THAN 4:00 on Monday, March 19.
That's the FIRST day of finals week. (Did you get the part about
NO LATER THAN? That means NO LATER THAN. Start planning now).
The short assignments will each constitute 20% of your grade.
Each midterm will count 15%. The term paper will count 30%.
Writing Assignments
You are responsible for two short writing assignments. These are
due Monday, February 5, and Monday, February 26. Each report
should be about 750-1,500 words, and reference at least three
different sources of information. At least one source for each
paper should be something in print, i.e. not off the Web, which
can be found in Knight Library. Some useful bibliography and a
list of relevant Web sites can be found on the 211 Web page.
Here are a few sample topics. These all concern general issues
that will be discussed at one time or another in class, but you
don't need to coordinate your assigments with the syllabus; feel
free to choose any topic for any due date. Feel free to pursue a
topic of your own, but it's probably a good idea to run it by me
first:
Report on a political issue somewhere in the world that primarily
concerns language. For example:
Legal repression of or arguments about the legal status
of minority languages: Basque or Catalan in Spain
or France, Breton in France, Hungarian in Romania,
Russian in Latvia, Welsh or Scots or Gaelic in the
United Kingdom, Native languages in the U.S. or
Mexico or Canada, Kurdish in Turkey, French in
Canada, etc.
Historical and/or social/political status of a minority
language (Lapp/Saami in Sweden/Finland, any of the
many minority languages of Russia, China, the
U.S., Mexico, etc.)
Political and linguistic arguments about the
distinctiveness of Serbian/Croatian, Hindi/Urdu,
Dutch/Flemish, etc.
Issues concerning choice of official language(s) in a
multilingual nation (Singapore, India, Canada,
Paraguay, many African nations such as Nigeria,
Kenya, Zaire, South Africa, etc.)
Report on a recently deceased or nearly deceased language. There
have been stories in the popular press over the last 10 years
concerning Ubykh, Winnebago, Kickapoo, and a number of others;
you can find other language names in the articles in the
Endangered Languages section of the Web page. Try a Web search
(see what you come up with if you just search for "last speaker
of") or use the periodical indexes for one of these language
names.
Discuss theories of the prehistory--i.e. the geographical origin
and spread--of some language family. You need to choose a family
for which there is accessible information. Good starting
references for Indo-European and Austronesian are given in the
bibliography on the Web page. If you are ready to tackle some
more difficult readings I can suggest references for Algonquian,
Penutian, Uto-Aztecan, and Australian languages. I think you
could probably find information to write about Bantu, Afro-
Asiatic, or Dravidian, though offhand I couldn't tell you exactly
where.
Report on a creole language which has been or is now used as a
lingua franca in some part of the world (e.g. Tok Pisin, West
African Krio, Bislama, Papiamentu).