Around the world, there are about 5, 000 living languages and dialects. The multilingualism of the Earth’s population has developed for many reasons, for example, the fragmentation of life of ancient tribes that lived in groups, and did not even suspect the existence of other people. Each tribe created its own so-called proto-language, which subsequently developed and branched. There are about 13 such languages.
Residents of different countries around the world speak different languages. Sometimes in one state there are several dozen languages and dialects, for example, in the United States in New York alone, people speak 129 languages and dialects. Distinguish between living (colloquial), dead (for example, Latin) languages, the language of the deaf and dumb, artificial languages, and even fictitious, for example, the Elven from the trilogy of J. Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings."
The common function of all varieties of languages is communicative. This is a means of sound, sign (written) and gesture communication, information transfer.
There are still two scientific hypotheses of the origin of languages, as well as many myths and legends. Some scholars suggest that all modern languages originate from one language, the so-called Pramir language. However, it is not necessarily the primary language. Perhaps in the past there were other languages that became extinct. This linguistic hypothesis is called the theory of monogenesis.
The second hypothesis, the theory of polygenesis, is that the current languages evolved from several proto-languages that were created and developed independently of each other. In any case, none of the concepts can be confirmed historically due to the great old age and lack of evidence.
One way or another, the tribes that inhabited the Earth several millennia ago already spoke different languages. The planet’s population was growing, states were being created, mass migrations and mixing of peoples took place, lands were seized, the social structure was changing. All these changes could not but affect the development of languages.
Tribes grew, branched, developed new territories, the same languages in different places developed differently, dialects appeared. Thus, today it is difficult to imagine that, for example, English and Russian belong to different branches (Germanic and Baltic-Slavic) of one language family - Indo-European. Its parent language, the pre-Indo-European, arose about 5-6 thousand years ago.
In the world of 5000, and according to some reports about 7000, languages. They are studied by the extensive humanities of linguistics. Linguists study language laws and derive general laws, develop and supplement the existing classification. World languages have many common features, so linguistics studies similar trends in languages, analyzes them and derives universal hypotheses that are characteristic of most known languages.
