Introducing English Linguistics

2 The development of English
1. 1 c, 2 a, 3 a, 4 b, 5 c, 6 a, 7 a, 8 c
2. There are obviously many possible answers to this question. For instance, if you clicked the
link to Belize, you would have found that English has the status of a “national or official lan-
guage.” Because English is an official language in Belize, by definition, it is a second (not a
foreign) language. Belize has a total population of approximately 273,000 people. Although
the precise number of speakers of English is not given, approximately 55,000 are listed as
speaking Belize Kriol English. Six languages other than English or Belize Kriol English are list-
ed as being spoken, most commonly Spanish (approximately 80,000 speakers). 70 percent of
the population is literate, and residents of Belize attend on average slightly fewer than eight
years of school.
3. Answers will vary depending upon the place name chosen, but here is information on
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. The Concise Dictionary of World Place Names notes two possible origins
(p. 340) for the name Milwaukee, both based on words from two unspecified Native American
languages: Mahn-a-waukee, meaning ‘gathering place by the river’, and Milioke, meaning ‘good
earth’ or ‘good country.’ The Wikipedia entry for Milwaukee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Milwaukee, accessed June 17, 2008) provides more specific information, citing three different
possible origins from three different Native American languages. The entry notes one of the
meanings in the Oxford entry ‘Gathering place [by the water]’ but claims that this meaning
derives from the Ojibwe word ominowakiing. This contradictory information reveals that ety-
mology is in many cases a guessing game. At the same time, the information notes the impor-
tance the Milwaukee River played in the settlement of Milwaukee and also that the area was
originally populated by Native American tribes in Wisconsin.
4. Cognate vocabulary has proven instrumental in grouping languages into language families:
the so-called comparative (or genetic) method of language classification. We know that
German and English are part of the Germanic language family because words for father, for
instance, in these languages begin with the sound /f/. In languages outside the Germanic lan-
guage family, words for father begin with /p/ (e.g. Latin pater). This is one piece of evidence that
Germanic is a separate family but part of a larger language family: Indo-European.
5. Typological classifications of languages group individual languages according to the linguis-
tic structures that they have in common. English and Chinese are typologically similar
because, for instance, both are isolating languages (i.e. languages with words that are discrete
morphemes). Genetic classifications of languages group individual languages into language
“families” using, for instance, cognate words to determine how closely related languages are.
Genetically, English and Chinese are very distantly related: English is an Indo-European lan-
guage, Chinese a Sino-Tibetan language.
6. English is a fusional language because it marks number and one case (the genitive or posses-
sive) on nouns, as in birds, the boy’s book. But this system is far simpler than those found in
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ANSWERS TO SELF-STUDY ACTIVITIES

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languages such as German or Latin, which have a complex system of inflections marking
case, number, and gender. English is therefore more of an isolating language because mean-
ing is expressed in separate words. For instance, some instances of possession can now be
expressed by the preposition of, as in a friend of John.
7. External: Borrowings into a language result from contact with speakers of other languages.
English has so many words of French and Latin origin because earlier in its history there was
contact between speakers of these languages and speakers of English.
8. No: A language undergoes language death when it no longer has any living speakers. As dis-
cussed in the chapter, many of the indigenous languages in the Americas have either died or
are in the process of dying because speakers of these languages have over time started to speak
other languages (e.g. English or Spanish). Although John Simon may think that English is dying,
he is really overreacting. Like many reactionary prescriptivists, he thinks that Modern English is
so riddled with grammatical errors that it is in the process of dying. But he couldn’t be more
wrong: English is spoken by more speakers than any language in the history of civilization.