Normandy Language Map / Carte de la langue Normandie.

by @UKLANGMAPPING

Mapping the Spread of Words Along Trade Routes.

Endangered Language Challenge - Cypriot Arabic

Name(s) of the language?

What is it’s genealogical classification?

Location of the language?

Number of speakers?

The endangerment situation

Speech community

Official and/or legal status

Documentation status

Sorry its not the best addition, but I’ll get better with time! Also, if there’s anything I got wrong or missed, please let me know!

Endangered language moodboard-Cypriot Arabic

Cypriot Arabic is a dialect of Arabic spoken only in Cyprus by the Maronite community that has existed on the island since the 10th century when people from modern-day Lebanon and Syria arrived on Cyprus. (This is a different community than modern-day Lebanese immigrants to Cyprus). Cypriot Arabic is an official minority language of Cyprus, along with Armenian. It is considered critically endangered as it only has a few thousand speakers and is expected to die out within the next one or two generations. Although efforts have been made to preserve the language, the community became fragmented after being displaced during the Turkish invasion of 1974. Prior to ‘74, there were four Maronite villages in North Cyprus, Kormakitis, Asomatos, Karpashia, and Ayia Marina. Today, these villages are mostly abandoned, although one holds a small number of enclaved persons. Despite past assassinations of enclaved persons, in January the Cypriot government approved the applications of 120 Maronites requesting to be resettled in their native villages. Members of the Maronite community hope for reunification of Cyprus in order to resolve the fragmentation that has endangered their language, and consider reestablishment of the four Maronite villages in occupied Cyprus to be essential to preserving Cypriot Arabic. @useless-lebanonfacts

language moodboard: classical arabic

language moodboard: palestinian arabic

Language moodboard: Vainakh languages

The Vainakh language group consists of the dialect continuum between the Chechen and Ingush languages spoken by the Chechen and Ingush peoples, two very closely related ethnic groups indigenous to the North Caucasus. The Chechens and the Ingush collectively refer to themselves as Vainakhs. Together with Bats the Vainakh language group forms the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family.  

Languages of Africa, with ነቢ

17/7/20 — Coptic

What is the language called in English and in itself?

• I think this one might be one of the easiest things I write in a while because it’s fairly common knowledge that the name “Egypt” is a mispronunciation of the original name of Memphis (*ħwt kʔ ptħ)—with Coptic being of a shared etymological origin. The widely known name in English literature Coptic is ultimately borrowed from Arabic [qubtˤ] ‘Copt’ which in itself is borrowed from Coptic, which borrowed from Greek, which ultimately borrowed from Egyptian. It’s a pretty straightforward thing. Of course, in the language it’s not referred to properly as Coptic and the common native term for it is ⟨ϯⲙⲉⲧⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ⟩ [t(ə)metɾemənkʰeːmi] in the Bohairic variety, which means “speech of the people of Egypt”. Coptic of course has various dialects but the main one’s encountered historically and in the modern day in liturgy are Sahidic and Bohairic with the latter being the current dialect of as far as I am aware all Coptic churches.

Where is it spoken?

• Coptic is a liturgical language so it’s spread is essentially wherever the Coptic Egyptian diaspora can be found, but when it was still a spoken language as late as the 17th century per some estimates—whatever be the case the Coptic Christian population were likely the last portion of the Egyptian population to be linguistically Arabized and unlike Egyptian Muslims, typically do not identify their ethnic identity with the language they speak although that’s a topic outside of linguistics to a large degree. I don’t really think a map of where Coptic was natively spoken is necessarily needed in this case, I think we all kinda have an idea of where it was spoken and considering it was spoken throughout the Egyptian Nile Valley from the Delta to Aswan.

How many speakers does it have?

• There’s no official count of people who speak Coptic; it’s essentially like asking how many people speak Ge‘ez or can read Old Kanembu. I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that individuals who know Coptic do use it as a spoken language between one another, but there’s nothing in the way of an actual number of speakers available. Liturgical languages tend to be studied with less focus on their current speech population, partially because in almost all cases it is an L2 and historically understanding the social aspect of Coptic as a language has come second if not last in regards to the academic study of it. There is of course revitalization efforts but those typically don’t show up on the radars of many linguists.

Does it have a writing system?

• Yeah, the Coptic alphabet, which is in itself a Greek originated alphabet with some characters carried over from the Demotic Egyptian script—this script would actually later be borrowed by Nubian Christians and used, with some minor alterations, for Old Nubian.

What language family does it belong to? What are some of it’s notable relatives?

• Okay let me specify at least one thing: no, Egyptian and Coptic are not the same language. Coptic is the descendant of Egyptian, and thus indeed continuous of it and inextricably linked to it, but it is not the same language. That really shouldn’t take away from its status, but it’s important to clarify the taxonomy there because a lot of the time Coptic is just outright called Egyptian when in reality the language of ancient Egypt and Coptic have a vast amount of differences. That being said, Coptic is an Egyptian language and is a member of Afroasiatic—depending who you ask the question of where it stands in Afroasiatic is rather open; I personally see it plausible from my knowledge of Egyptian and Amazigh that the two are probably two of the closer branches within Afroasiatic, but we might never know. Academic stagnation kinda comes into play there and I’d rather not turn this into a rant about how frustrating Afroasiatic linguistics can be because the studies of a language are rooted in academic traditionalism. Just to help illustrate when Egyptian becomes Coptic, here’s a chronology of Egyptian from Haspelmath, Grossman, & Richter ed. (2014):

What is it like phonologically?

• So I’m just going to show a comparative inventory of the consonants between dialects and Common (Old) Coptic, Coptic vowels are a bit more tricky of a topic because of the quality vs. length debate—what I will note though is that it’s generally agreed Coptic varieties in the past generally realized ⟨b⟩ as the bilabial fricative *β:

What is it like grammatically?

• Coptic is of course grammatically similar to Egyptian: broken plurals, grammatical gender, so forth. In specific the broken plural feature can be found to have developed throughout Afroasiatic, such as in Semitic, South Cushitic, and Beja. Egyptian is a standout for restructuring its inherited verbal morphology and this follows into Coptic as well—unlike Semitic, Amazigh, and Cushitic there is no verb conjugation for instance. All nouns in Coptic have grammatical gender, marked with a prefixed definite article—rather similar to how Amazigh languages typically mark the feminine plural with a prefixed [t-] and the feminine singular with circumfixed [t-...-t] although Amazigh languages on average don’t mark masculine nouns and this is something that is done in Coptic.

What personally interests you about the language?

• I’m sure anyone intimately familiar with Afroasiatic would agree, it’s pretty easy to write about Coptic. Not because Coptic is vastly similar to other Afroasiatic languages, because it isn’t, but it’s one of the best known members of the phylum. When people talk about Afroasiatic they typically think of a handful of languages and Coptic is usually one of them. Outside of the ease of the ability to approach Coptic, it’s a genuinely interesting language. The last time there was sound changes in the languages, in the liturgy, was in the late 19th century! It has the longest continuous written history of any language given it’s a direct continuation of Egyptian which is something I think we can all appreciate. It went from being the language of all Egyptians to be safeguarded and preserved by the ethnoreligious group who remained despite the cultural and linguistic Arabization of the Nile Valley—that’s enough of an anecdote to initiate interest in the language.

Extra stuff:

• So as always, here’s a book, this time it’s “Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective” (2014), and a thesis “Modern Spoken Coptic and Community Negotiation of Linguistic Authenticity” (2015). As always as well, a cool word; doesn’t have to be long to be cool:

(Just in case; this is supposed to be a light overview post. No, no, this is not supposed to be an in-depth analysis of Coptic—I know some people might want that but yeah, no.)

Variation of different regional Arabic dialects of “What are you doing?”

“Inshallah” & “Mashallah” around the world and words/phrases descended from these terms in other languages

These Arabic words have been written and illustrated to look like what they represent   

Source                     

The Louvre 

Mont Saint Michel Abbey

Glottal Stop

Languages that have a phonemic glottal stop /ʔ/ - about 40% of all human languages. This is a very widespread consonant except in Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Turkic, Uralic, Mongolic, Dravidian, Koreanic and Japonic languages.

It’s almost universally present in the indigenous languages of the Americas, in Afro-Asiatic languages, in Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages, in Papuan languages, North Caucasian langauges, and in some Khoe, Sino-Tibetan, Daic, Uralic, Iranian, Turkic and Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. It’s also present in Estuary and Scouse English as in ‘watter’ as /woːʔɐ/. 

Aspirated plosives

Aspirations occurs in English in initial onsets like in ‘pat’ [pʰæt], ‘tack’ [’tʰæk] or ‘cat’ [’kʰæt]. It is not phonemic, since it doesn’t distinguish meanings, but it’s distinctive in Mandarin e.g.  皮 [pʰi] (skin) vs. 比 [pi] (proportion). 

Non-phonemic aspiration occurs in: Tamazight, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Kurdish, Persian, Uyghur. 

Phonemic aspiration: Sami languages, Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Mongol, Kalmyk, Georgian, Armenian, North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Hmong-Mien languages, Austroasiatic languages, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Odya, Bengali, Nepali, Tai-Kadai languages, Nivkh, many Bantu languages (Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu, Venda, Tswana, Sesotho, Macua, Chichewa, and many Amerindian languages (Na-Dene, Siouan, Algic, Tshimshianic, Shastan, Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixtec, Oto-Manguean, Quechua, Ayamara, Pilagá, Toba, etc.)

Map of Spanish accents