Linguistic distance is how different one
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
or
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
is from another.
Although they lack a uniform approach to quantifying linguistic distance between languages, practitioners of linguistics use the concept in a variety of
linguistic
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
situations, such as
learning additional languages,
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
, language-based conflicts and the effects of language differences on trade.
[
]
Measures
Lexicostatistics
The proposed measures used for linguistic distance reflect varying understandings of the term itself. One approach is based on
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as ...
, i.e. the ability of speakers of one language to understand the other language. With this, the higher the linguistic distance, the lower is the level of mutual intelligibility.
Because
cognate words play an important role in mutual intelligibility between languages, these figure prominently in such analyses. The higher the percentage of cognate (as opposed to non-cognate) words in the two languages with respect to one another, the lower is their linguistic distance. Also, the greater the degree of grammatical relatedness (i.e. the cognates mean roughly similar things) and lexical relatedness (i.e. the cognates are easily discernible as related words), the lower is the linguistic distance.
As an example of this, the
Hindustani word ''pānch'' is grammatically identical and
lexically similar (but non-identical) to its cognate
Punjabi
Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan
* Punjabi language
* Punjabi people
* Punjabi dialects and languages
Punjabi may also refer to:
* Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
and
Persian word ''panj'' as well as to the lexically dissimilar but still grammatically identical
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
''pent-''
[ List of Greek and Latin roots in English#P] and
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
''five''. As another example, the English ''dish'' and
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
''tisch'' 'table' are lexically (phonologically) similar but grammatically (semantically) dissimilar. Cognates in related languages can even be identical in form, but semantically distinct, such as ''caldo'' and ''largo'', which mean respectively 'hot' and 'wide' in Italian but 'broth, soup' and 'long' in Spanish. Using a statistical approach (called
lexicostatistics) by comparing each language's mass of words, distances can be calculated between them. In technical terms, what is calculated is the
Levenshtein distance.
Based on this, one study compared both
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gr ...
and
West Frisian with
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
to see which was closer to Dutch. It determined that the Dutch and Afrikaans (mutual distance of 20.9%) were considerably closer than Dutch and West Frisian (mutual distance of 34.2%).
However, lexicostatistical methods, which are based on retentions from a common proto-language – and not innovations – are problematic due to a number of reasons, so some linguists argue they cannot be relied upon during the tracing of a phylogenetic tree (for example, highest retention rates can sometimes be found in the opposite, peripheral ends of a language family).
Unusual innovativeness or conservativeness of a language can distort linguistic distance and the assumed separation date, examples being
Romani language
Romani (; also Romany, Romanes , Roma; rom, rromani ćhib, links=no) is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani communities. According to '' Ethnologue'', seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their ...
and
East Baltic languages respectively.
On the one hand, continued
adjacency of closely related languages after their separation can make some loanwords 'invisible' (indistinguishable from cognates, see
etymological nativization
Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the form of words and ...
), therefore, from lexicostatistical point of view these languages appear less distant then they actually are (examples being
Finnic and
Saami languages).
On the other hand, strong foreign influence of languages spreading far from their homeland can make them share fewer inherited words than they ought to (examples being
Hungarian and
Samoyedic languages
The Samoyedic () or Samoyed languages () are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether. They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Urali ...
in the East Uralic branch).
Other internal aspects
Besides cognates, other aspects that are often measured are similarities of
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
and written forms.
[ ''... vocabulary, grammar, written form, syntax and myriad other statistics ... this scalar measure of "linguisitic distance" is demonstrated through an analysis of the determinants of English language proficiency among immigrants ...'']
To overcome the aforementioned problems of the lexicostatistical methods,
Donald Ringe
Donald "Don" Ringe () is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist.
Ringe graduated from University of Kentucky and then received a Master of Philosophy in Linguistics as a Marshall Scholar from the University of Oxford. He received Ph.D in l ...
,
Tandy Warnow and
Luay Nakhleh developed a complex phylogenetical method relying on phonological and morphological innovations in 2000s.
Language learning
A 2005 paper by economists Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller attempted to put forth a metric for linguistic distances that was based on empirical observations of how rapidly speakers of a given language gained proficiency in another one when immersed in a society that overwhelmingly communicated in the latter language. In this study, the speed of English language acquisition was studied for immigrants of various linguistic backgrounds in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
and
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...
.
See also
*
Abstand and ausbau languages
In sociolinguistics, an abstand language is a language variety or cluster of varieties with significant linguistic distance from all others, while an ausbau language is a standard variety, possibly with related dependent varieties. Heinz Kloss i ...
*
Language transfer
Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature sp ...
*
Second-language acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...
*
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
References
{{reflist, 30em
Applied linguistics
Historical linguistics
Quantitative linguistics
Language acquisition
Language comparison