GeoMag

L AY E R S O F L A N G U A G E S

AARNAV HASTANTRAM

LAYERS OF LANGUAGES

World languages are divided and sub-divided into many different categories and they are based in different parts of the world. The first languages were of no written origin and were mostly improvised by new scriptures. Korean, for example, was built from scratch when farmers couldn’t read banners about well-being as they didn’t understand Chinese. Now, you might think all languages come from the same roots, well they have several different roots based on the geographical location of the world. If a language was spoken in South America, it would be a long way for it to get to the UK! We know that dialect and

accent has changed as people have relocated and introduced their own cultures and societies in the places they live. One of the main languages derived from all the subdivisions is Proto-Indo European. This language is the main language spoken across Europe and Asia or called by enthusiasts as “Eurasia”. In this language several of the main words were derived, example “Mehter” from Proto Indo European, which in French can be shown as “mere” and “mother” in English, another example is “oynos” in Proto-Indo European and can be traced to “uno” in Spanish, “un” in French and “ondu” in Kannada.

Vedic Sanskrit, one Proto-Indo European language, travelled down to South Asia (Indian subcontinent) where it evolved into Indo-European but then after changing the script several different times it was finally made Vedic Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit contains the letters of Devanagari Script and is a forefather to many different languages. It gave birth to many new languages in the North of India and remoulded languages in the South and East of India. The Religious Vedas were written using the Vedic Sanskrit script. Vedic Sanskrit travelled from the top of Jammu Kashmir down to the very south of India, and it has changed different languages across India. Classical Sanskrit (the Sanskrit that most learn in schools today) impacted three different languages that were also in use in the southern part of India, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. A new language was formed out of Classical Sanskrit called “Prakrit”, a spoken variation and with subtle differences. Pakrit gave birth to Assamese, Oriya and Bangla to the east of India, Maldivian and Sinhala to the south of India, Punjabi to the north of India, Sindhi, Marathi, Gujrati and Marwari to the west of India, Hindi and Bihari in central India. These languages have incorporated the Prakrit script and have sculpted their language around it. Take for example, Urdu, the exact vocabulary and speech is similar to Hindi while the writing script is similar to Arabic. However, Tamil is a historical and very isolated language which has fought to not include Prakrit in its scripture. The Tamil alphabet has not changed since thousands of years and has a very simple number of characters in it because they would like to maintain their own scripture that existed way before Prakrit was created. Back to Indo-European, where there is another layer, Iranian. This language is widely spoken in Iran and was spread eastwards to Pakistan and Afghanistan. As it spread eastwards the languages started to break into three different types. Firstly, Pashto, spoken in majority of Afghanistan and the northern Pakistan, a language very similar to Arabic, and in some ways Urdu! Secondly, Baluchi, which is spoken in Southern Pakistan and, thirdly, Kurdish spoken in the west of Iran and also has several different speakers in Armenia, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

What you know today as Europe, consisted of these languages thousands of years ago: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, and Greek. Slavic is where most European languages were brought to life. These languages include Czech, Russian, and Polish, and other languages like Romanian come from the same roots. The alphabet uses number of Latin influences but mostly they are unique. After the downfall of Soviet Union many new countries decided to use the alphabet and make versions of their own. Now, Romance, I know what you will be thinking, that’s no name for a language, but it’s actually the mother of Latin and used many concepts of Proto-Indo European. Latin was spoken across the entire Roman Empire and created new languages such as Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese. It also impacted English and the alphabet that you see in these languages which are the base for the entire world and usually the most preferred script to write in today. Have you ever wondered why German words and Austrian words are very different compared to Spanish and French? It was because they came from Germanic. In Germanic, there are two different languages, Scandinavian and Western. Scandinavian gave birth to many other Scandinavian languages such as Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. It also had a small impact on Spanish. Western made Old English and German, while these two languages were also impacted by Latin, the original language was written in Western. Greek has two varieties, Donic and Ionic. Moving completely away from Proto-Indo European to several different independent languages. Chinese and Tibeto-Burman are part of the Sino-Tibetan family. They use their own writing systems and are mostly connected in speech. Under Chinese and Tibeto-Burman are many more dialects and accents. Lastly, the root language of Arabic was Afro-Asiatic. Malay and Japanese are spoken down in Australasia and its root is Austronesian. Several different mentions of independent languages are Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Trans-New Guinea. The final language is Niger-Congo which evolved into Mande, Atlantic-Congo and Kordofanian.

52 | Geographical Magazine • Merchant Taylors’ School

2021/22 Edition | 53