Europe: So Many Languages, So Many Cultures

The number of different languages in Europe by far exceeds the number of countries. All European countries have national languages, and in nearly all of them there are minority languages as well, whereas all major languages have dialects. National borders rarely coincide with linguistic borders, but the latter (including dialect borders) mark by their nature also more or less distinct cultural areas. This paper presents a survey of the different language families represented in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and the four Caucasian language families, each with their sub-branches and individual languages. Some information is given on characteristic structural phenomena and on the status and history of these languages or language families and on some of their extinct predecessors. The paper ends with a short discussion on the language policy and practices of the institutions of the European Union. Europe lacks a language with the status and power comparable to Indonesian in Indonesia. The policy is therefore based on equal status of all national languages and on respect for all languages, including national minority ones. The practice, however, is unavoidably practical: “the more languages, the more English”

Europe: so many languages, so many cultures

The number of different languages in Europe by far exceeds the number of countries. All European countries have national languages, and in nearly all of them there are minority languages as well, whereas all major languages have dialects. National borders rarely coincide with linguistic borders, but the latter (including dialect borders) mark by their nature also more or less distinct cultural areas. This paper presents a survey of the different language families represented in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and the four Caucasian language families, each with their sub-branches and individual languages. Some information is given on characteristic structural phenomena and on the status and history of these languages or language families and on some of their extinct predecessors. The paper ends with a short discussion on the language policy and practices of the institutions of the European Union. Europe lacks a language with the status and power comparable to Indonesian in Indonesia. The policy is therefore based on equal status of all national languages and on respect for all languages, including national minority ones. The practice, however, is unavoidably practical: “the more languages, the more English”.KEYWORDSLanguage families in Europe: Uralic, Caucasian, Altaic, Indo-European; language spread through history; structural variety of European languages; language policy in Europe and European countries

Gender and the Indonesian pronouns

The absence of a gender opposition in the Indonesian pronominal system requires special strategies in the translation from languages which do have such an opposition illustrated in the first part opf this article. In the second part the lexical and morphological means are discussed with which Indonesian expresses gender, culminating in a description of the use of perempuan and wanita, pria and laki-laki.Keywords(Semantics of) gender oppositions, personal pronouns, Indonesian

Sound-changes and loanwords in Sungai Penuh Kerinci

In this paper I shall (re)analyse the historical development of the Sungai Penuh variety of Kerinci in terms of sound-changes, with special attention to forms which deviate from the more common patterns. Data for this study have been taken from the stencilled version of Amir Hakim Usman’s Kerinci-Indonesian dictionary (1976) with handwritten annotations by the author, the late David John Prentice, and myself, the result of elicitation sessions with the author in 1977 in Leiden. Some additional data derived from Usman 1988 and from an interview with the author in 1999