Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:04:20.745Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Multilingualism everywhere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2011

DAVID LIGHTFOOT
DAVID LIGHTFOOT*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Department of Linguistics, Box 571051, Intercultural Center 479, Washington, D.C. 20057-1051, USAlightd@georgetown.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

If one asks how many languages there are, one can imagine at least three answers: one, over six billion, or 7,358.

Type
Peer Commentaries
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 162 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Gordon, R. Jr., (ed.) (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th edn.). Dallas, TX: SIL International.Google Scholar
Hudson Kam, C., & Newport, E. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language variation and change. Language Learning and Development, 1, 151–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, M. P. (ed.) (2009). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (16th edn.). Dallas, TX: SIL International.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, D. (1994). Degree-0 learnability. In Lust, B., Hermon, G. & Kornfilt, J. (eds.), Syntactic theory and first language acquisition: Crosslinguistic perspectives (vol. 2): Binding, dependencies and learnability, pp. 453–472. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, D. (2006). How new languages emerge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Neil, W. (1978). The evolution of the Germanic inflectional systems: A study in the causes of language change. Orbis, 27 (2), 248–285.Google Scholar
Roberts, I. (1998). Verb movement and markedness. In DeGraff, M. (ed.), Language creation and change, pp. 287–327. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (1999). Universal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 169–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305, 1779–1782.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singleton, J., & Newport, E. (2004). When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from impoverished input. Cognitive Psychology, 49, 370–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Gelderen, E. (2004). Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar