Linguists share language insights for International Mother Language Day
Professor Jochen Zeller and professor Sihawukele Ngubane share fascinating insights about languages across the globe.
AS International Mother Language Day is commemorated on February, 21, the Berea Mail reached out to local Linguistics experts to find out more about what defines a mother tongue and how languages are grouped across the globe.
Jochen Zeller (PhD), who is an associate professor of Linguistics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal speaks English as a second language. His mother tongue is German, but what does this mean?
“Someone is a mother tongue speaker of a language if this language is the person’s first (or native) language – the language they acquired from birth, which was spoken to them by their caregivers. Although you can only have one mother, you can have more than one mother tongue,” said Zeller.
In South Africa, there are more mother tongue isiZulu speakers than any other language. Zeller cited the latest General Household Survey conducted by Stats SA saying isiZulu is spoken by 25.31 % of the population overall.
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“These household surveys and the census typically don’t ask people about their mother tongue, but rather which language they speak most often in the household/home. This may not always be the same language,” he said.
Bilingual speakers
Many South Africans are bilingual, meaning they speak two languages.
“Being bilingual is sometimes defined as having knowledge of more than one language or using them regularly and frequently in one’s daily life. Early bilinguals, who acquire more than one language in early childhood and before the onset of puberty, usually end up speaking both languages with native speaker proficiency. This is very difficult to achieve for late bilinguals,” said Zeller.
Someone who is learning a second language is likely to struggle if the language follows a different word order to their mother tongue. Word order is one of the aspects that Linguistics use to group languages together.
Language grouping
“Languages can be grouped according to their historical or genetic relationship. For example, Germanic languages are derived from, a common ‘ancestor’ language, so English and German are genetically related, but English and isiZulu are not. Another approach to classifying languages is linguistic typology, which groups languages according to shared grammatical properties, such as basic word order or morphology (words),” said Zeller.
Word order is either subject, verb, object (SVO) or subject, object verb (SOV) or verb, subject, object (VSO).
“Bantu languages such as isiZulu and English would fall into the same group according to word order as they are SVO languages, but into different groups according to morphology as most Bantu languages are agglutinating and English isn’t,” said Zeller.
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Morphology refers to the study of words. In some languages like isiZulu, words are agglutinating, said Sihawukele Ngubane a professor of African Languages in the School of Arts at UKZN.
“By agglutinating language, we mean a language that combines word elements to express compound ideas,” he said, “ In the case of agglutinative languages such as isiZulu a sentence is made of one word. For example: Ngisaphila – a full sentence which means ‘I am well?’ in English.”
IsiZulu, like many langauges today, has many borrowed words from other languages such as Afrikaans and English.
isiZulu adopted the English ‘window’ to form iwindi and from the Afrikaans word, tafel came the isiZulu word itafula.
“This has advanced the isiZulu language drastically. As technology has developed isiZulu vocabulary has adopted words from other languages and coined new words such as iselula (cell phone), ikhompyutha (computer) and udizili (diesel),” said Ngubane.
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