LANGUAGE FAMILIES:

By usual definitions, there are approximately 5000 languages in the world but many are only spoken by a small number of people. One task of Language Typology is to make some sense of this data. There are a number of approaches.

We can consult maps of the major world language groups which will show the distribution of languages. Alternatively we can refer to language 'family trees' to see how languages may be related to each other. However, it is unclear how this kind of knowledge can help us to modify our classroom behaviour.

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LANGUAGE TYPE:

We can look at the form of a language and discover, for example, whether a language is isolating, inflecting, fusional, agglutinating, stress or syllable timed and so on. Although this can help in certain ways - we may be able to modify course design or teaching procedures, for example, to take account of the fact that some of our students' languages do not inflect the verb to show tense or person - these terms are not absolutes. English, for example, can be: Isolating - The boy will ask the girl. Inflecting - The biggest boys asked. Agglutinating - antidisestablishmentarianism.

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LANGUAGE DIFFERENCE:

An alternative approach is to look at how much common languages differ from English in terms of their phonology, grammar, orthography and lexis. The implications here for course design are clear. The greater the differences from English the student's language demonstrates, the more s/he may need exposure to the target language forms.

WORD ORDER STUDIES:

'Even in structural areas such as basic word order, where it has been claimed transfer is almost non-existent, clear evidence for transfer can be found.' (Ellis, 1994.)

This approach looks at how the canonical (most usual or dominant) word orders in a language may differ from English. Although English is variable, it can generally be shown to have the following word orders:

Subject-Verb-Object, Adjective-Noun, Pre-positions rather than Post-positions, and either Genitive-Noun or Noun-Genitive.

There are six variations on the S-V-O theme: of 100 languages examined (by Mallinson and Blake in 1981): VOS - 2, VSO -9, SVO - 35, SOV - 41, OVS - 1, OSV - 1, Free - 4, Other - 7. 75% of languages are, therefore, either SVO or SOV.

The understanding of the term 'subject' is variable, however, with some languages being topic-dominant and some, like English, being subject-dominant. Others, like English and German, may show variable word order. Even the orders NA vs. AN, PR vs. PO, NG vs. GN depend on sustainable definitions of, for example, the term 'adjective'.

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Further references:

Aitchison, J, 1989, The Articulate Mammal, Routledge.

Comrie, B, 1983, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, Blackwell.

Croft, W, 1990, Typology and Universals, Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, D, 1997, English as a Global Language, CUP.

Crystal, D, 1987, Encyclopaedia of Language, Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, R, 1994, The Study of Second Language Acquisition, Oxford University Press.

Greenberg, J, Ferguson, C and Moravcsik, E (Eds), 1978, Universals of Human Language (4 vols), Stanford University Press.

McLaughlin, B, 1987, Theories of Second Language Acquisition, Arnold.