Analysis of the Video Mother Tongues: Languages Around the World (2007)

The video Mother Tongues: Languages Around the World discusses the various languages found in Africa, Oceana, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The film starts with a brief description of Africa’s nearly 2000 languages. It explains that because of Africa’s relative isolation and long history of occupants it has the most languages of any land mass. The African languages include anything from Arabic, Swahili, or the ‘click’ language. Click languages are located only in Africa; in these languages the clicks function as normal consonants.The many languages of Africa all evolved differently due to separation between groups. For example the Nigeria area has over 400 languages and almost every language group is represented. Africa has unique sounds such as kp or gb which can be written has ibgo. These sounds are not common in places other than Africa. Swahili is probably the best-known African language. Developed along the Indian Ocean near areas such as Kenya. Swahili was adopted from many languages especially Arabic. Swahili has taken on an international image as one of the main languages of Africa.

The next section of the film goes into the language families of Oceania: Papuan, Austronesian and Australian. These languages were spread throughout the region by seafarers over thousands of years. The diverse languages that make up this region are an excellent example of how languages developed into unique forms because of lost contact. These languages are roughly a quarter of the world’s languages but barely make up a tenth of the worlds population. Papua New guinea alone for example has more than 800 languages. One-fourth of all the world's languages are Austronesian, but the languages from this family are spoken by less than one per...

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...nche, Hopi and Pipil. It is found primarily in western United States and Mexico.

Numerous large language families can be found in Latin America. Quechua was the language of the Incas and currently has around 9 million speakers. Q’eqchihas has around ½ a million speakers and was the language of Mayan society.

The film goes into basic information about many of the worlds’ countless distinct languages and language families and how they are diversified throughout the world. The film highlights how a single ancestor language can evolve into a variety of unique languages. These languages divide and change until eventually they become mutually. Many of these languages can be traced back and included in language families. Not all languages can be traced back so easily and because the mutually unintelligibility is so high, similarities to other languages cannot be found.