Introducing English Linguistics

native language
(Australia, Canada, Ireland, Great Britain, New Zealand,
and the United States) but in many other countries in which it is either
a second language (e.g. Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Tanzania, and
Singapore) or a foreign language (e.g. most of Western Europe). In addi-
tion, anyone wishing to fly a commercial airliner must be fluent in
English, since English is the lingua franca of the airline industry; in all
major tourist areas of the world, shopkeepers, hotel clerks, and others
involved in the tourist industry will commonly have some knowledge of
English.
It is important to remember, however, that the widespread use of
English has little to do with the language itself but more with the fact
that British colonization spread English around the world, a phenome-
non that was followed by the emergence of the United States (which has
the highest percentage of native speakers) as a political and economic
force. Had world events been different, English might still be a language
spoken only in Great Britain, where it had its origins over 1,500 years
ago.
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

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Languages have been traditionally classified in terms of the genetic rela-
tionships that they exhibit. The term “genetic” is being used metaphori-
cally to describe relationships among languages, because only humans
possess genes. However, it has proven useful to group languages into lan-
guage families
. Within a given family, languages can be “parents” of
other languages, “siblings” of one another, and so forth. These relation-
ships are expressed through successive branchings of a family tree.
Figure 2.1 provides an abbreviated depiction of the language family,
Indo-European, of which English is a member. The Indo-European lan-
guage family, according to the Ethnologue (Gordon 2005: 16–17), is one of
94 “top-level” language families in the world and comprises 430 actively
spoken languages. While not the largest language family – with 1,495 lan-
guages, this honor goes to Niger-Congo – it contains eight of the twelve
languages listed in Table 2.1: English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Bengali,
Portuguese, French, and German. The remaining four languages in the
table belong to different language families: Mandarin to Sino-Tibetan,
Arabic to Afro-Asiatic, and Indonesian to Austronesian. Japanese is an iso-
late, a language whose classification into an existent language family has
proven difficult and is the subject of much dispute among linguists.