MIRACLES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE:

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS.

AN

MARC VAN OOSTENDORP

LEIDEN UNIVERSITY

Week 1:
1.1 Human Language and Animal Communications Systems.
Hi, and welcome to this very first video of our very first module in our MOOC on the miracles of human
language. Finally, the fun can begin. Finally, we can start exploring the basics of human language
together.
This course is all about variety
because that's what human
language is all about. It's all about
diversity. But we will also look at
things that are the same in all
languages. This particular module is
our introduction, and that may
mean that it's actually the most
important module of all, because we're going to define our field
of research by asking certain questions. Questions such as what is
language? Do animals have language? How many languages are
there in the world? How do we count those languages? How are
they related to each other? What do linguists do? How do they
get their data? And what are informants?
In this first video, were going to look a little bit at animals. Do animals have a language as well? Well, it's
clear that animals communicate, so your cats may communicate to you a little bit or chimpanzees in a
zoo may clearly talk to each other in some way. But it's also clear that there are differences between
animal communication, and human communication. Your cat can communicate maybe some of her
needs to you, but you will never be able to have a full conversation with her. And apes may have even
more complicated systems of talking to each other. But they will never teach a MOOC about ape
language.
We have more signs clearly than those apes or cats. We have more words.
But is that the only difference? Is the only difference that we have more?
Well, obviously the answer to that question is no. And we're going to look
at three dimensions in which language, human language, and animal
communication are different: discrete infinity, displacement, and joint
attention. Don't worry, I'm going to explain all three of them.
First, discrete infinity that maybe sounds a little bit complicated, but it's

actually quite simple. Discrete means limited or countable. A discrete

system is a system with a limited number of things in it. The alphabet is
excellent example. English has an alphabet of 26 letters. That's a limited
discrete set, but with these limited items, you can make many different
words, and with those many different words, you can make many different sentences. How many?
While I would claim infinitely many, any thought which gets into your head you can express, and there
are infinitely many thoughts, probably. I can also prove that there are infinitely many sentences,
because if there would be finitely many, there would be one sentence which would be the longest of
these finite sentence. Now I could take that sentence and say, Pete says, and then that sentence would
already be longer. And I could repeat that procedure. I could say John says that Pete says that, and
then our longest sentence. Mark says that Pete says that John says and so on. But admittedly those
sentences would not be extremely interesting, but they would be longer and longer and longer, infinitely
long, as a matter of fact. Not so for animals. Apes also have a discreet set system of calls, a limited
number of calls, but they cannot combine them to make more and more complicated systems. They only
have a limited number of combinations.
The second difference with animal communication is called displacement. We
humans can talk about our here and now, but also about things far away in
the past, on the moon or even about completely abstract things, which we
have never seen and will never see. Most animals don't have that. Bees can
communicate about space, because they can dance and wiggle and show
other bees where to find their honey. It's a lovely system, but it's very limited.
They can only talk about honey they have really seen. They cannot talk about
some abstract honey on the moon, or something like that.
Finally, there's a notion of joint attention, and shared intentionality. We
humans work together as a team very often. We work as a team where we
have a shared goal and each has their own role in achieving that goal. In
order to be able to do that, it means we have to read each others minds a
little bit. We have to see what the other person is trying to do so that we can
help that other person in achieving that goal. Language helps in that.
Language is inherently cooperative. But for animals this is very different. Some apes have joint
attention, that means that they can look at the same thing and maybe be aware that they look at the
same thing, but they don't work together in this very complicated way in which we humans can do so.
We have now seen in this video that animals do have systems of communication, at least some kinds of
animals do. But that they are always different in certain key aspects from human language. These key
aspects are first, humans can make an infinite amount of messages with this limited set of building
blocks. Second, humans can talk about things other than the here and now. And thirdly, language is a
fundamentally cooperative tool for humans. In the next video, we will look a little bit further at what
language is. Is it really true that all humans have language?
1.2 Human Language vs. other Languages
In the previous video we looked at differences between
animal communication and human language. In this
video we're going to look a little bit deeper into human
language, and more specifically, into the question, is it

true that every human being has a language?

Language arguably is one of the most important distinguishing
characteristics of human beings. We use language for many different things.
We use it, at least, in order to communicate, to think, and to show who we
are, to which group of human beings we belong or want to belong. It's also
very hard to imagine a field in society where no language is used at all. So
it's a characteristic not just of human beings, but also of human society.
Let's first look at certain things which are called languages in English, but may
not really be languages in the sense we want to talk about here. Programming
languages for computers are, I think, clear examples of those, or the language
of flowers, or the language of music. We call them
languages in ordinary life, but not so in linguistics or in
this course. What is important for human language is
first, that there are native speakers, that there are
people that learn those languages as infants. Secondly, that one can speak
about basically everything in it. That's something we saw in the previous video.
And thirdly, that it is carried and recognized by a more or less well-defined
group of human beings as their language. There should be some people who say
this is our shared language.
So what about sign language? Is sign language also a language? You
may also wonder whether being spoken is not actually a
characteristic of human language. So using speech to transfer my
information from my head to your head, isn't that also what human
language is about? Well if that's what you think, you may wonder
about deaf people. Do they have a language as well if they don't
hear? Very often they have sign language. Is this sign language also
a language? The first thing you have to understand about that is not
necessarily every sign, every gesture I make is a language. But the systems which
are used by deaf people are called sign languages, and linguists consider them to
be real human languages as well. They're basically the same as spoken language
with this one difference, that they don't use speech. There are many sign
languages in the world. That's another interesting thing about them. So there's a
lot of variation in sign language, just as there is in spoken language. We don't
know how many different sign languages there are in the world. They're more
difficult to count. We know much less about sign languages than about spoken
languages, but there must be hundreds of them. Furthermore, sign languages
have exactly the same kind of functionality as spoken languages. They can be
used to express any kind of
thought. You can make infinitely
many sentences in them. They have native speakers.
They're groups of people, deaf communities, who
consider them to be their language.
So if deaf people have a language, does that mean that
everybody in the world speaks a language? Well

unfortunately, there are some exceptions. They're very few, and they're always people who are
suffering from some very physical, psychological or social impediments, or even some combination
thereof. Examples of people suffering from these very strong, social impediments are so called wolf
children. They're children who grew up without their parents, or where their parents didn't want to
speak to them for some strange reason. They may have been deaf children with hearing parents where
the hearing parents were ashamed of having deaf children. That, unfortunately, sometimes happens. Or
there may be cases of physical and psychological abuse.
One very famous example of this for linguists is the example of Genie. Genie was an American girl who
was locked up in her room from when she was 20 months old until the age of 13. She didn't have any
human interaction in that part of her life. Her parents were kind of crazy. Her father would only bark at
her like a dog, and her mother was not allowed to say anything to her. Therefore, she didn't learn any
human language during her youth. Also later on, she was not able to figure out this system of combining
all these words into infinitely many sentences.
Fortunately, these are, of course, very exceptional cases. Something very exceptionally bad must
happen to you to end up in such a state. People might also sometimes lose their language. They then
suffer from a medical condition called aphasia. This is something which
usually hits people after they had a stroke. They will lose part of their
language capacity because part of their brain no longer functions.
Interestingly, that can be just a very tiny part of using your language. They
may use their ability to pronounce, or their ability to understand language, or
their ability to speak coherently or their ability to make grammatical
sentences. So they can reveal a message, but their sentences will always be
very strange. In the 19th century, the study of such aphasic patients was one
way to find out what was the relation between language and the brain? So
after an aphasic patient would die, you would study the brain of the person to see where the problem of
that person was.
So the answer to our original question, whether all humans have language, seems to be yes. Something
must be really wrong for a human being not to develop some kind of language. But this raises an
additional question. What's the evolutionary origin of language, then? Is it as old as us, as homo
sapiens? Is it older? Or is it younger? It's very difficult to decide about this, for instance, because we
dont have falsifiable evidence. Language is something abstract. The moment I speak it, it's already gone.
Let alone that we can reconstruct language of 50,000 or 100,000 years ago.
There are theories about it. The main division is between continuity
based theories and discontinuity based theories. Continuity based
theories say that language is based on animal communication. It's
just a somewhat more complicated form of them. Discontinuity
theories say that human language is really something different.
Something must have happened in our development to make
human language possible. In the 19th century, there was a learned
society in Paris which disallowed linguists from even talking about
these matters, because they were so difficult to decide. In the past
few decades, we have started to speculate and think about them
again. But still, it's very difficult to give a definitive answer to that particular question.

In this video, we have seen there's really a very strong link between being human and using language.
Almost every human being uses language, even deaf people. If you have enough deaf people, they will
create and use a sign language. And they are definitely languages as well. We have seen that. We've also
seen that those very few humans who don't have a language live in very exceptional circumstances. It
might be either some kind of social condition as in the case of Genie, or some medical condition, as for
aphasic patients. Otherwise, being human means using language. A very obvious next question is, if
language is so important, how come we have so many different languages? That's what I will discuss
with Marten and Inge in the next video.
i.
1.3 Discussion with Marten and Inge: Language Diversity

In the previous video, I have shown to you that humans and language really belong together. And that is
not just because human language is different from animal communication systems. It's also because all
humans have a language unless there is something really, really wrong. And this MOOC, in every
module, I will also discuss topics like this with my students, Inge and Marten. This is going to be our first
discussion.
[Inge] Okay. I would like to ask the first question then, because you just said that all humans have
language, then so how come we do not all speak the same language?
[Marc] That's a very intriguing question. It's something which has intrigued people forever, for
thousands of years. Because it's so strange, it's so weird. It's maybe you could even think it's so bad that
we don't all speak the same language, because we can't all understand each other. Well, actually, I think
you can debate whether that's a bad thing or not, but you could say, at least it's strange. How come it is
a something, which is so human, why don't we all do it in the same way? And there are different
answers to this question. One of them is that, actually this whole idea that language serves as a
communication system. I have an idea in my head and I transfer it to you. That might not just be the
only function of language, maybe not even the primary function of language. There might be other
things, so to actually show that I am really different than you might be another function of language.
And I can show that by speaking differently, so that's one factor. And another factor might be just that

every generation has to learn the language again and language is really complicated. So things can go
wrong when you are learning the language. So when the children are learning the language, they might
do it just slightly differently. And this is how we believe for instance, that from Latin in Italy, Italian
derived and in France, French derived. Just because people started speaking differently and slowly over
the generations these languages drifted apart.
[Inge] So languages change and that's why there's so much variation, but do all languages also have the
same origin. So it could be possible that there was one region or place or a speech community even in
which there was a language that was like an ancestor of all the languages that exist now.
[Marc] That's a fantastic idea. That would be still so, okay. Maybe we don't all speak the same language
now, but at least we derive from ancestors who spoke the same language. So Latin maybe had a mother
and a grandmother, etc. And maybe if we go back far enough, we will find this one language, which is
the origin of all. One thing which makes this extra appealing is that it does seem to be the case that our
species, homo sapiens, does have one origin. I brought the globe to show where this origin is. Mainly
here, in East Africa. So we know for sure, at least it seems to be quite sure, that this is where we all
came from and people then migrated to different parts of the world in the course of time. Now, if it is
the case that homo sapiens already had a language, if it's really the case that humans and language
belong together, then maybe there was one language spoken already here, and then maybe all
languages derived from that. The problem is this is speculation. This is just mere speculation. And the
reason for that is languages have been written for maybe 5,000 years or something like that. 100,000
years ago when these migrations maybe started, people only spoke their language, and speaking is just
moving the air. That disappears. The things I said just now have already disappeared. They are no longer
there. They were in the air. They are no longer there, let alone the things of a 100,000 years ago. So it's
a nice idea that maybe there was a language, a common language a 100,000 years ago. Maybe it's even
true, but I don't think we will ever know what that language was.
[Marten] I also have question and that has to do with human language. We've seen that animals and
humans have different communication systems. But there surely are some things that look like
languages, and that sound like languages that humans use, but that I'm not sure that they qualify as
languages. For example, in what they use in Lord of Rings or in Star Trek or in Game of Thrones. There is
a system, and it's different from anything else that I know. So, is it then another language?
[Marc] Yeah. It's has become quite popular in the last decades to make a movie or science fiction movie
or some movie about some fantasy people and to give a language to those people. Actually, those
languages are very often made by linguists. They're produced by linguists. So, it's something which
linguists do. So can linguists make languages then? And the answer to that, in the end, it seems to be no.
A linguist cannot really make a language. And the reason for that is that an important criteria for
distinguishing a natural language from an artificial language is native speakers. Is the language learned
by children, from a very early age on? Is it learned in a natural way? So not like from a book or in the
classroom setting, but just by picking it up from their parents. And that doesn't seem to be the case for
these languages. So we don't consider them natural languages for this reason.
[Marten] Yeah. So, if I would learn Elvish from talking really well and I would teach it to my children.
Would they then be considered native speakers and is this happening? Does somebody do this, actually?
[Marc] I'm not sure whether anybody is doing this for Elvish. I don't think I would advise it for anybody
to do it for Elvish. But if it would be done, and if it would be done seriously, there would be several

problems for these children, because who would they speak Elvish to, except for their parents? But it
would be in my view an interesting case for linguists. It would be something which would become worth
studying. Still many linguists consider this to be a problem problematic kind of case, because there are
still all these issues of do, you'll probably learn many other languages as well this will just be a tiny part.
There's no community. That was another criteria we saw. There's not a community of speakers. We
distinguish natural languages and artificial languages also in that way. So there's still no community for
Elvish. So, in a crazy world where there would be a village that would all start speaking Elvish, in a few
generations it would be a natural language. It would be a wonderful experiment for linguistics. It would
maybe not be such a good experiment for humanity.
In this video, we've seen that although it might seem preferable for everybody to speak the same
language, there's also various reasons why this is not the case. There are historical reasons. There are
reasons of language acquisition. And we have seen that there are certain things, which in every day life,
we might call languages, but which linguists are more hesitant to take into account. And we mentioned
some of those like Dothraki, and I'm sure that among you there will be people who speak some of these
languages, like Klingon, or maybe you speak Esperanto. Do you think that those are natural languages,
given our criteria or not? You can go to our forum and discuss topics like this.
In the next video, we're going to look more into the diversity of the world's languages. I'm going to talk a
little bit about the question, whether languages are really countable and how many languages there are
in the world. And we're going to look into an important online reference work for studying language
diversity in individual countries and in the world.
1.4 Language Diversity and Ethnologue
After my discussion with Inge and Marten, in this video I want to look a little bit more into language
variation. How many languages are there in the world? How do we count them? How many languages
are there in the world?
It's actually difficult to decide, maybe it's impossible to decide on real scientific
criteria. We have to guess. The reason is that there's many areas in the world
where we simply don't know which languages are spoken there. And in other
areas, it's sometimes difficult to decide whether something is, for instance, a
dialect rather than a language. There are no objective criteria for making this
decision, so we guess. The most heard estimate is something between 6,000 and
7,000 languages in the world. That's also the number which is given by probably
the most authoritative list of languages, which is an online encyclopedia of
languages called Ethnologue. We're going to use that encyclopedia quite a lot in this course. Ethnologue
is free, and you can use it to find information about countries, about languages, about language families
etc.
This (top of next page) is an example of a webpage about a language from the Amazon called Itonama.
What you can see is that Ethnologue tells you where the language is spoken and what its status is. If
Itonma used to be spoken in some places in Bolivia, from the status we can see that the language is
actually dying out.
Ethnologue also gives us information about countries. Look at this page about Brazil, for instance. You
have to be very careful in interpreting the results about what Ethnologue actually says. Also, the editors

of Ethnologue sometimes make arbitrary

decisions about what to call a language or not. Take a look. As you see in Ethnologue, if you study it a
little bit more, you will find that many languages in Ethnologue are very small. Many have fewer than
say 1,000 speakers. Many of those languages are dying out, they will no longer be spoken in a century
from now. As a matter of fact, some people estimate that by the end of this century, there will be only
about 300 languages left in the whole world. This obviously
makes it very important to document these smaller
languages and to do so now.
So other languages are very big. Here's the top 10, with
Chinese as number one with the biggest population of
speakers, and followed by Spanish and English. But let's take
a closer look at Chinese. That's not just one language. There
are
actually
many
different varieties. And
those varieties in some
other parts of the world
might be called separate
languages.
In this MOOC, you will discover that those 6,000 or 7,000 languages
can differ from each other in many different ways. For instance,
there are languages which seem to have around 20 different vowel
sounds where as other may have only two or three. Or it is even
claimed that there are languages which have only one vowel sound.
Some languages seem to put a lot of information in one long big
word. Turkish is an example of such a language. Others seem to
have very short words and therefore, they have sentences with
many words. Vietnamese is an example of such a language. In
Chinese, we have different words for the older brother of your father and the younger brother of your

father. In English, you would always use the same word for those two
different people. On the other hand, if you speak English, you always
have to distinguish between the sentences. He is nice, masculine, and
she is nice, feminine, which Chinese speakers do not have to do.
In the next modules, we're going to look
in much more detail into these kinds of
differences. But in spite of those
differences, languages can also be very
similar. One factor for these similarities
is that they are organized in families, in languages which are historically
related to each other. For instance, French and Italian are so called sister
languages because they have the same parent language, namely Latin.
You can also see this because many of their words are very similar. The
French word un, of course in Italian uno. The French word main
corresponds to Italian mano. The French word homme corresponds to
uomo.

German and English are also related to each other. And again, we can see this. The German word ein is
the English word one. The German word Hand is the English word hand. Languages are just structure
based on these kinds of relationships. And we can go even further. We call German and English
Germanic languages because they are related to each other. French and Italian we call Romance
languages. But in turn, Romance and Germanic are part of the same language family. Mainly IndoEuropean, so they are related at a slightly different level. Most of the languages in Europe belong to this
family, as do many languages spoken in Asia.

There are a lot of these families around the world. Other examples are the
Dravidian languages spoken in South Asia, of which Tamil is an example. Or
Niger-Congo, spoken in sub Sahara Africa, of which Swahili is a famous
example. In some regions, there's still much confusion about how languages
are exactly related to each other. For instance, in South America, there's still a
lot of debate about this. Also, there are languages that do not seem to be
related to any other language in the world. A well known example of this in
Europe is Basque. It's spoken in Europe, in Spain and France. But it's not clearly
related to any other language spoken in this continent.
There are also other reasons why languages can be similar. For instance, they
can be in contact with each other. They can be spoken in the same area and
people may borrow words from each other.
Internet is an English word that we now find in many languages,
because many languages are in contact with English.
And finally, all human languages are built according to a similar scheme
because they're all spoken by humans. We all have similar bodies. We
have similar brains. And therefore, also our languages are similar.
In summary, we now know there are about 6,000 languages. But we
also know that it's actually very hard to count them precisely. I've shown you around on Ethnologue a
little bit, which is a very useful tool. I would like to invite you to use it, to explore it a little bit on your
own, to find out things about your own language, your own country, or other languages and other
countries. We've also looked about what are the factors which make languages be similar or related to
each other. And I've given you a few teasers about how languages can be different, and the same. And
we're going to talk a lot more about that in the next modules.
So now you know a little bit about languages as a research topic. But in the next video, I'm going to
explore a very intriguing question with the students Inge and Marten. The question, what do linguists
really do?

1.5 Discussion with Marten and Inge: What do linguists do?

In the previous video, I introduced you into the miracle of linguistic variety. There are so many different
languages in the world, and we cannot even count them. And I introduced you into one of the most
important resources we have for studying linguistic variety in the world and in individual countries, the
so-called Ethnologue website. I'm now going to discuss topics like this more with my students Marten
and Inge.
[Marten] So, I first have a seemingly stupid question about linguists and Ethnologue. Is that just the tool
that they use? Do linguists just sit at their desk all day looking at Ethnologue?
[Marc] Yes, typing on words, then trying to see on this website. No, that would indeed be a little bit silly,
I think. For one thing, obviously there are also linguists who make the Ethnologue website, so they
would definitely do something else. But actually linguists do many different things. I think this is one of
the nice things about being a linguist, you can work in many different kinds of places. The famous
American social linguist, William Labov, once said, linguists work in five different fields, in five different
areas in the world. They work in the library, they work in the bush, they work in the closet, they work in
the laboratory, and they work on the street. And I think that's a very nice distinction, and maybe we
can discuss these five a little bit more now.
[Marten] Okay, so, the first was library. So, I would expect a linguist who works in the library to look at
books, to work with books, maybe history books.
[Marc] Right, I have to say Labov said this in the 1970s, so this was really before the Internet. So I think
looking at Ethnologue would be something which you would do in the library at that time as well, and
looking in the Internet now counts as being in the library sometimes. But it is, indeed, associated with
looking into reference works. An important group of linguists who uses the library a lot is so-called
historical linguists. They are the people who study the history of the individual language, or the way in
which languages are related in language families. They can also study the way in which language is used,
for instance in literary work, those are called philologists. They may sometimes be called linguists,
sometimes not, but, if they are a bit egomaniacal, then we can say they are linguists, as well. That's a,
that's a large group. It's an important group. It has been the traditional place where linguists work.
[Inge] Okay. In a library. So they also work in the bush? I was thinking what does this mean? Does it
mean like, there are linguists who go to far away places, in the bush maybe? Who try to find new
languages, or try to describe them, or...
[Marc] Right, well, yes. So, these are very admirable people I think. They go indeed to difficult places
usually to study languages, which are new in the sense that we don't know anything about them. And
for most of the 6-7,000 languages of the world, we hardly know anything, because they're spoken in
areas where people are difficult to reach, they're spoken by small groups of people. Most, or a large
majority of the languages, have really not been described. Maybe we know a handful of words, and
that's actually a problem, given that many of these languages seem to disappear. So people say they're
going to disappear over the next hundred years. Maybe in a hundred years from now we only have a
few hundred languages left. We may not want these languages to be gone without leaving any trace
because they can give us a lot of information about what human language can do. So, it's a pity for us as
linguists, if they disappear. It might also be a pity for the people involved. Very often these people move
to some kind of dominant, often European language. For instance, in Brazil they might move to

Portuguese, or in Indonesia they might move to Indonesian. And they do so for good reasons, namely,
they want to have a good career or want to give their children a good career opportunity. But it's a pity
that these languages are sometimes lost, because their children, in the end, might want to go back to
their roots, and want to know more, at least know more about it. If you haven't written anything, we will
never know anything more about it. So this is a big concern to a very large group of linguists nowadays,
to try to conscribe and describe the languages of the world.
These languages, as I said, they are very often spoken, while the bush is just one kind of term, but
they're spoken in areas which are not very easy to reach. People go there and spend a few years of their
life, to describe these languages and live with those people. And that's another thing which linguists do,
it's a very different area than working in the library, of course.
[Marten] And I think it's also very different from working in the closet, right? I think, maybe from that
list, that one was the one that puzzled me most, because in the closet, well what would someone do
there? Presumably you're alone, because there's not a lot of space. And you're, you know, you have
tunnel vision that some project that you're working on, in solitude.
[Marc] Well, what would you think that a linguist does in the closet?
[Marten] Well, write, probably.
[Marc] Write. Well, okay, so that's obviously something that every scholar needs to do at some point, so
in that sense, it's clear that every scholar needs a closet. But there's also many linguists who spend their
time in the closet, for instance, because we need a lot of thinking, we have already seen, just in the few
videos before, we have seen that there's many puzzles about human language. There are many things
we just don't understand, and in order to understand them, you might want to be alone, or with a
colleague together and just sit behind your desk and think, or you might want to write a grammar of an
individual language. So if you think, that's what we typically call a theoretical linguist.
And if you write a grammar, you would be a grammarian, obviously. Grammarians are often theoretical
linguists as well, because they spend their time in this closet. Again, there's a large group of linguists
who spent their life like that. If you're describing, just your own language, if you're describing the
language which you speak every day, and there's many things, there's no language which has been
described completely. English, obviously, is a language on which many people have worked. The
grammar of English has been described, really fairly well, and still, there are things we don't know. Still,
linguists can spend their time working on it. If they speak English as their native language, they don't
need to go to the bush to find other people who speak that, they can just consider their own knowledge
about these languages. So, linguists can easily spend their life in the closet as well.
[Inge] Okay, and other linguists work in the lab? It seems an interesting place, I was wondering what are
they doing there? I can imagine that you need, if you want to study language, in a lab, you need people,
so, and what happens? You have to make them speak.
[Marc] Yeah, well I mean obviously, if you think about language in the lab. Yeah, you're probably going
to bring in people into that lab, because they will produce the language. And you also need some
machines, right? So do we have any idea about what kind of machines they could be?
[Inge] Well, I'd say computers and microphones and that kind of...

[Marc] Yeah, so microphones is obviously a good thing. So there's phoneticians, we're going to look a
little bit into that next module. Phoneticians who study speech sounds, so we can record those speech
sounds, and then typically put them in the computer and study them in detail. Exactly what do you do,
when you produce these sounds? How do these sounds look like and how are they different from one
speaker to the next? So that's one thing you can do.
There's another big group of linguists, they're usually called psycholinguists, so they study linguistics in
combination with psychology or from a psychological point of view, so the way in which people in their
mind work with language. Very often, they also work in a lab. In the lab, again, they put people, maybe
they put a computer, and they do little tests with the people on that computer. All right, so it's
languages which we already know, but we don't know how exactly people behave, how they react to
words, how fast can they recognize a word when they see it. Well, if you have very precise technology,
you can see that.
And maybe there's a third kind of lab, which is interesting now days, you can also put people in a brain
scanner, and look into their brain and see what happens there, when they use language. If language is
something which is so specifically human, there must be certain things in our brain, which are
specifically human and which go on when we are using language. That's something you can study. So the
lab is indeed, as you say, a very interesting place. It's an interesting place to be, it's a place where
linguists have learned many things about how language works.
[Inge] Yes, and Labov's final point was at the street, so linguists work on the street. So I can imagine that
there are linguists who just go on the street and who listen very carefully to what the customer says to
the butcher and the butcher says to the customer and vice versa.
[Marc] Right, yeah. So you, so you could say the street in that sense, the street is like the bush, but it's
just a little bit closer to home. But what Labov meant specifically with the street is not just to describe
one language, but he is very interested in the small differences. If the butcher talks to the customer, do
they speak differently, or does the butcher speak differently to the customer than to his mother? Well,
the answer's probably yes, unless his mother is his customer. That's small variation, and those are things
which people find interesting as well. And about where we can learn many things, because these small
variations, they're very tiny, but, well they may end up being as big as the difference between French
and Italian. So from studying that, we can also learn how languages start varying at a larger scale.
[Marten] So now that we've seen all these five things, everybody of course wants to be a linguist after
taking this course, so where do you think would be best for people to go?
[Marc] Yeah, would it be best to be a linguist in the library or would it be best to be a linguist, well, in
one of these other places? Labov said, and I think he is completely right in that, we need all five of those.
In this video, we have seen that linguists work in many different kinds of areas in the world. In the next
video, you are going to do some field work yourself. But don't worry, you don't have to go into the bush,
you can just do this behind your desk in the library or in your closet.

Interview with Dr. Victoria Nyst

[Marten] Hello. Today, we're doing an interview with Dr. Victoria Nyst who is a sign language linguist at
Leiden University Center for Linguistics. And she's going to explain to us all about sign languages and
why they're such interesting topics of research. So first, could you maybe introduce your field of
research, what is it that you do?
[Nyst] My field of research is sign
languages as you just mentioned. Sign
linguists study the linguistic structure of
sign languages as used by deaf
communities all around the world. My
main focus is on sign languages used in
Africa. I've taken a cross linguistic
perspective on that.
[Marten] Okay. So, when you say sign
language is used in Africa. That means
that there are also other sign
languages, for example, used in Europe.
So, there's not just one sign language
that everybody uses.
[Nyst]
That's
a
common
misunderstanding that many people
have, that there would be one universal
sign language. And they're usually a bit disappointed to hear that that's not the case. But actually there
is a lot of variation just like with spoken languages. We see that spoken languages have a multitude of
different structures and the same holds for sign languages, which may differ in their lexicon or their
phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.
[Inge] You know, this reminds me of one of the videos in our MOOC week. We also spoke the phonology
of spoken languages, and we saw that spoken languages are built from sounds, so these are the building
blocks, but how does this work for sign languages then?
[Nyst] Yes. Well, perhaps surprisingly, we also talk about phonology, in the context of sign language
linguistics. Why is that? On the one hand, of course, many people are surprised because phonology,
contains the word phonos, sound. And obviously, being used by deaf people, sign languages don't
majorly depend on sound as distinctive units. But we do see the same kind of systematic use of, abstract
building blocks. Whereas spoken languages use sounds, sign languages use what we call parameters that
are articulated simultaneously. And these parameters are the hand shape that is used to articulate the
sign, the movement that the hand makes in the articulation of the sign, the location where the hand

located. Is it located in space, on the body, on the head? Also the orientation of the hand, so do the
fingers point upwards or to the front? What about the orientation of the palm? That can also be
distinctive. And lastly also non-manual features like facial expressions or particular mouth movements
like puffed cheeks or different kind of facial expressions can also be distinctive. So these parameters are
phonemic in sign languages in a sense that like sounds, they can be distinctive. So when we look at
minimal pairs in spoken languages we see that sign languages have equivalents, but then differing only
in one parameter.
[Marten] So could you give an example of that?

Figure 1 Snail (circular arm

motion)

[Nyst] Yes I can give an example of a sign language I've been studying
extensively in West Africa, Adamorobe signing language. In Ghana, this sign
language has a sign for snail and a sign for snake, which are very similar but
differ in only one parameter, the hand shape parameter. So the sign for snail
and the sign for snake, I will show them to you and you can see what the
difference is. So the sign for snail looks like this.
And the sign for snake looks like this. I guess you
can see the difference in hand shape, right? So
we have a fist, and an extended index, and that
generates this difference in meaning in
distinguishing snail from snake.

[Inge] Okay. And if you look at spoken languages and sign languages, what is
it that makes sign languages special? What do, can sign languages show us
that spoken languages cannot maybe?

Figure 2 Snake - Arm motion

moving forward

[Nyst] That's a very important question. There are many issues that are similar in sign language, many
phenomena that are similar in spoken language and sign languages. At the same time, there is one very
important crucial point that sign languages can contribute to the field of linguistics, and that is basically
what is the effect of modality on language structure? So over the past decades, we've focusing on
spoken languages. We've been studying universal tendencies, et cetera, in spoken languages. But now
when we start looking at sign languages, this opens a whole new window on how human language
functions when it passes through a different channel.
[Marten] And you said earlier that you, your focus of research lies mainly with African languages? Are
there differences between African sign languages and European sign languages with respect to this
iconicity of what you just talked about?
[Nyst] Yes, yes, yes. So I guess that's one of the reasons why I got drawn to this subject. I noticed there
seemed to be different tendencies going on in West African sign languages on the one hand, and, for
example, European sign languages on the other. One of things is that often you have more than one
option to iconically depict an object. Take for example a bottle. How would you use your hands to depict

a bottle? One of the ways is to trace the outline in space. So, the round
hand shape shows that the object is round. The upward movement shows
the extent of the bottle. And well, so you get an idea of a bottle. Right?
You trace the outline in space. Another way would be to embody that size
and shape, so for example like this. You can see a forearm kind of
embodies or becomes the bottle. So those are two
different options. So I am on the one hand
outlining, on the other hand embodying or
becoming the object. Now if we look at West
African sign languages it seems that the
embodiment strategy is kind of more popular, is
Figure 3 Bottle: Round hand
moves upward to trace
volumetric shape

the preferred one, and the outline strategy is used

much less as compared to sign languages of
European origin. So there is a marked difference
there and that is, well, a topic I am currently

working on
[Marten] One final question I would like to ask. When I am talking to you, and
when everyone is talking, we are making movements, gestures with our hands.
Is that also sign language, and is there a relationship between what I do and
like, for example, Dutch sign language?

Figure 4 Bottle: arm is the

shape of a bottle

[Nyst] Well, I think that that's really a very hot topic actually in sign language
linguistics now. For a long time the area of gesture studies and sign language studies, these fields were
quite separate and because both of them were quite new, I guess. Now these fields have matured a
little bit, and now we start looking at the overlap between the two. So what is actually, what do they
share, where is the difference? And personally I am again interested in the use of iconicity also in the
gestures of hearing speakers. For that purpose I have also been thinking is there a kind of gestural
correlate or gestural explanation for the difference between West African sign languages and European
sign languages? So this kind of preference for outlining in space, is there a gestural explanation for that
in the gestures of human speakers? So we've been interviewing speakers of three West African
languages and we found that whereas European speakers, for example French and Dutch, typically have
one strategy, which is, showing the size and shape of an object in space, West African speakers tend to
have two options. Either they show in space or, they show the size and shape of an object on the part of
a body part, like this. So there appears to be a clear difference in the gestural strategies of hearing
speakers and somehow there may be a relation there or a kind of causal effect on the structure of
iconicity in sign languages.
[Marten] Okay, thank you very much for this interview. Thank you for explaining some things about
what sign linguists do. And if you would like to know more about that, we'll post some background
reading for you to have a look at. And we'll see you in the next video.

[Nyst] Well thank you for having me here. I'll be really curious to know from all the viewers to what
extent they recognized the use of body based signs and shape gestures. Are you familiar with these,
these kind of systems? Did you see other people use it? Or do you use it yourself? Please share with us
on the forum. Thank you.
Introducing Han Hu, speaker of Mandarin Chinese
Hi, we have been talking a lot about languages now, but maybe it's time to also look at some real
languages and some real speakers. And that's what we're just about to do. So, at this point in every
module of this MOOC, we're going to look at some real language data. We found informants from all
over the world to give us data about their language. And in every module, we will look at the specific
topic we're studying in that module for all those different languages, and you are going to do that, you
are going to do most of that analysis. I'm going to present you a little bit about how to get data from an
informant, and we will show to you how you can analyze those data, but in most of the videos will be
there for you to study, and that's going to be part of your homework. In this very first module we're just
introducing the different speakers we have. We're asking them a few things about their languages. It's
going to be your task to check what they say against some of the available sources like Ethnologue,
which we have discussed before.
With me now here is Han Hu, who is going to tell me a little bit
about her language and her own linguistic situation. So, tell me,
what is your language, and tell me a few things about it.
[Hu] My language is Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is
spoken by Han people. There are nearly 1 billion people who
speak it, and I know that people in Singapore and Malaysia also
speak Chinese. In a narrow sense, Mandarin Chinese refers to
standard Chinese and it is the official language in People Republic
of China.
[Marc] And this is your native language.
[Hu] Yes. I think I speak Jinyu. It is a dialect branch of Mandarin Chinese. And I think it's very different
from Mandarin Chinese. I began to study standard Chinese when I was 6 years old. At that time I went to
the elementary school. It was a compulsory to study Mandarin Chinese, standard Chinese. And we have
to speak it in the public areas.
[Marc] And are there any other languages you speak?
[Hu] I just speak English hm, [LAUGH].

[Marc] Fortunately. You will find our analysis of the data you have just heard on the course page. On
that course page, you will also find all the other introductory videos of our informants. And we invite
you to study those. You will find a form on the course page which will guide you in making that kind of
analysis.
If you're following the advanced track, or if you're just into this kind of things, there's a very fun thing for
you to do, this is to upload your own video. In every module, you can upload your own video for a
language which interests you for some reason. Maybe it's your own language, maybe it's some language
of your neighbor, of your friend, or a language which interests you for some other reason. Find a
speaker of that language, ask them the questions which we are asking of our informants, make a video,
and upload that video. In that way, it will also be fun for all the rest of us, we will have many more data
to look at and to study. But in any case come over to the last video of this particular module. In this last
video, we will summarize what we've seen so far, and we will discuss a little bit more some of the
interesting, of the marvelous miracles of human language.
Introducing Roberta DAlessandro, speaker of Abruzzese
Hello, my name is Roberta D'Alessandro. And I'm here for
Abruzzese. Abruzzese is a Southern Italian language, not a
dialect as it is usually classified. And it is spoken in Italy, of
course, by about 1 million speakers. And it is spoken mostly by
bilinguals. So everybody who speaks Abruzzese also speaks
Italian, which is the official language of Italy. And I, myself, also
speak of course, Italian, and English as you can see, and then I
know some other languages. German, Dutch, Spanish,
Portuguese, a bit of Finnish and Russian.

Introducing Beste Sevindik, speaker of Turkish

Hello, I'm Beste, and I'm a native Turkish speaker. Turkish is the official language of Turkey and northern
Cyprus, and it has around 80 million native speakers. I can speak
Turkish, English, a little bit Dutch and German and a really tiny
little bit Japanese. I learned English in elementary school, and
since then I watched a lot of TV shows, and it's really helped me
to learn more about English. Now I'm very much comfortable
with expressing myself and reading articles and books in English.
And with Dutch I'm living in here in Netherlands for almost one
and a half year now, and I heard a lot of Dutch, of course, and I
now I can understand a lot of things all ready, and I, but of
course I want to learn how to speak as well, so I will take some
lessons for that. And with Japanese, I love watching Anime, and I
love Japanese culture, I love literature and also music and

everything, so, well that's how I learned Japanese, a little bit. Well, and, but here I'm here now to speak
Turkish.
Introducing Khalid Mourigh, speaker of Tarifit Berber
Hello. My name is Khalid Mourigh. I'm speaker of Tarifit
Berber. Tarifit Berber is a Berber language spoken in
northeastern Morocco by approximately 1.5 to 2 million
people. It is not only spoken in northeastern Morocco, but
also in many European countries, as there are large
immigrant communities in these countries. In the
Netherlands, for example Tarifit Berber is the second
immigrant language after Turkish. Beside Tarifit Berber, I
learn Dutch spoke both languages at home. And later on I
learned other languages at school, for example French,
German, English, and Moroccan Arabic.
Introducing Varun Decastro-Arrazola, speaker of Basque
Hi I am Varun, and I am a speaker of Basque. Basque is a
language spoken in the Western Pyrenees. It falls under
the administration of two states, France and Spain. There
are around 7 or 800,000 speakers of Basque. And about a
half a million of these have learned at home as a native
language. Virtually all of the speakers of Basque are
bilingual with French or Spanish. In France it doesn't have
any official stages, but it does in Spain, which means that,
for example, it's being used in education at all levels. Since
I come from the border area, the border between France
and Spain, I speak both French and Spanish on top of
Basque. I've also lived in other places, so, I also speak Catalan, Dutch, and English.
Introducing Enoch Aboh, speaker of Gungbe
My name is Enoch Olade Aboh. I'm a speaker of
Gungbe. Gungbe is a Bey language of the Kwa family of
Niger-Congo. It is spoken in Benin, in the southern part
of Benin. In a town which is, actually also the capital of
Benin, but it has three names. One Gungbe, which is
Hogbonou. The other one in, Yorubar, which is Adjace.
And the third one in Portuguese, which is, Porto-Novo.
It's a tone language in the sense that it makes
distinction between toe, which is ear, and toe, which is
country. In addition to Gungbe, I speak French. I

consider myself as a bilingual because I pick up French at home and also at school. I also, speak English,
which I learned, in school. I learned a little bit of, Spanish. So that's for, let's say, the Romance and
Germanic languages. But Gungbe itself is what I call my father's tongue. Because it's not, my mother
tongue. It's the language of my father's community. And my mother's community is which is related to.
And from the part of what we call the Western Bey languages. Gungbe is also spoken in Nigeria and also
Lagos in Nigeria. I think are about one million people who speak this language in this area.
1.6 Summary: Language and Dialect
Hi, and wow this is already the last video in this module. I hope you have enjoyed it. I hope you have the
feeling that you have learned a few things. I hope you got our main message. I think the main message
of this module is that these words, human and language, really belong together, that language is
something very specifically human on the one hand, and on the hand that virtually all human beings
have language in one form or another. I'm sure that you still have many questions. And hopefully, some
of these questions will be answered in later modules of this MOOC. There will be other questions which
you can already ask now and can start discussing now with each other and with us. For this, you can go
to the online forum which we have on our course page. Here you can discuss all kinds of topics which
you think are relevant to this MOOC. And as a matter of fact, Marten has already prepared one question
for us.
[Marten] So, the question that I'm at this point most interested in finding an answer to, is based on
something that our informant said. What I'd like to know, is there a linguistic way to really distinguish
between what a language is, and what a dialect is?
[Marc] People feel very passionate about this, so some of our informants have also felt very passionate
about this question of whether what they speak is a language or a dialect. And I'm sure that also among
you there will be many who have this particular question. And the only thing I can say now that this is a
question which is difficult to answer from a scientific point of view, and that's also because it's partly
also a political question. It's also, just who decides, who has the power to decide about these issues? But
in order to really study this question, I invite you to go to our reading material on our course page. You'll
find a lot of interesting things there which we ask you to read. And that will also give at least a partial
answer to Marten's question. So, go to our forum to discuss things there.
Well, I hope you already found the time to do the exercise with our informants and got to know all of
them. But let me remind you that we also have a weekly quiz. And if you do the weekly quiz, you will be
maximally prepared for the next module. In this next module, we will stop being so completely
introductory, and we will really move into the language. We will really start studying the language. And
we will start from the smallest building blocks of language. What are those smallest building blocks?
They are the sounds of human language.
Required Readings

Anderson, Stephen R. "How Many Languages are there in the World? Linguistic Society of America
Brochure Series, 2010 http://www.linguisticsociety.org/files/how-many-languages.pdf
Jackendoff, Ray. "How did Language begin?" Linguistic Society of
America. http://www.linguisticsociety.org/files/LanguageBegin.pdf
Dasgupta, Shreya. "Can any animals talk and use language like humans?" BBC Online, 16 Februari
2015. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150216-can-any-animals-talk-like-humans
"Language Status" Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). Ethnologue:
Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version,
2014. http://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status
"The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee." Georgia Tech College of Computing,
2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDGPgXtK-U
Background readings

Michael Tomasello (2010). Origins of Human Communication. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Click here
for more information.
Steven Pinker (1994). The Language Instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: Harper
Perennial Modern Classics. Click here for more information.
Victoria A. Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams (2013). An Introduction to Language." 10th ed.
Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. Click here for more information.
Noam Chomsky (2006). The Architecture of Language. Oxford India Paperbacks. Click here for more
information.
Guy Deutscher (2006). The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankinds Greatest
Invention. Holt Paperbacks. Click here for more information.
Joel Davis (1994). "Mother Tongue: How Humans Create Language. Birch Lane Press." Click here for
more information.
Resources

LanguageLog. Blogposts on news, new articles and observations by several renowned linguists, among
which Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. Click here to read.
Babel. Language Magazine featuring everything from Chinglish to Shakespeare. Click here for more
information.
Bergmann, A., Hall, K.C., & Ross, S.M. (Eds.). (2011). "Language files: Materials for an introduction to
language and linguistics". 11th ed. Columbus, OH: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State
University. Click here for more information
Linguistic Society of America. This organisation publishes the number one scholarly journal for
linguistics, appropriately called Language.However, they have also published a plethora of free
pamphlets on a wide variety of linguistic topics, written by pre-eminent scholars. Some of these we are
allowed to use in this MOOC (for which we are very grateful), and there are many more on their
website. Click here for more information.

These transcripts were produced by a course student without compensation. The intellectual property
belongs to Leiden University. Errors are the responsibility of the transcriber.