I. Brainstorming

Both English and Chinese belong to Natural Language. What is Natural Language?

II. Types of language

(1)Natural languages and artificial languages

1)Natural languages

A natural language is language that is the mother tongue of an ethnic community. There are about 4000 natural languages.

Among natural languages in the world, some have achieved special status due to historical reasons and are chosen as official languages.

Lingual Franca are natural languages which are used for communication between two different groups of people, each speaking a different language. They are used to break the barrier of communication between nations.

2) Artificial languages

Languages which are specially invented to facilitate international communication are called artificial languages.

Esperanto was created by a Polish oculist, Ludwig Lazarus Zamennhof, which was based on the main European language with easy grammar and pronunciation.

(2) The genetic classification of languages

The genetic classification of languages is based on the assumption that Languages have diversified from a common ancestor. E.g. Chinese: Sino-Tibetan Family; English: Indo-European family.

(3) The typological classification of languages

It is based on a comparison of the formal similarities or differences between languages

1)Phonology

Phonologically, languages can be grouped in terms of how they use speech sounds—how many and what kinds of vowels they have, whether they use tones, and so on. E.g. Chinese is a tone language, while English is not.

2)Morphology

Morphologically, languages can be classified on the basis of the way words are constructed. There are three main types:

(a)Analytic/ isolating languages

A language in which word forms do not change, and in which grammatical functions are shown by word order and the use of function words is called analytic language. There are no inflections or formal changes such as Chinese and Vietnamese;

(b)Synthetic/inflecting/ inflectional languages

It is a language in which the form of a word changes to show a change in meaning or grammatical function such as English, Latin, Greek and Arabic. Grammatical relationships are expressed by changing of the internal structure of words, typically by changing the inflectional endings.

(c)Agglutinating languages

It is a language in which various affixes may be added to the stem of a word to add to its meaning or to show its grammatical function. Words are built out of a long sequence of units, e.g. Turkish, Swahili

3)Syntax

Syntactically, languages can be classified by observing their word in the sentence. The three basic elements of the sentence, the subject, the predicate (verb) and the object can be arranged in the six different orders: SVO, SOV, VSO VOS, OVS and OSV. The most frequent word orders found in the languages of the world are that the subject precedes the object.