Introduction;

Languages are the essential tools of communication among human being and almost all creatures on the face of the earth. Language is built of various elements. What are these elements of any language, and how do they develop? This is the purpose of my presentation.

Language plays a unique role in capturing the breadth of human diversity. We are constantly amazed by the variety of human thought, culture, society, and literature expressed in many thousands of languages around the world. We can find out what people think only through their language. We can find out what they thought in the past only if we read their written records. We can tell future generations about ourselves only if we speak or write to them. If we want other civilizations in space to learn about us we send them messages in dozens of our planet's six thousand languages. The main purpose of this essay is to provide information about the language families of the world and their most important and populous members, including their history, status, their linguistic characteristics, and their writing in as simple and concise a way as possible. We base this website on the belief that all languages have evolved from the need of human beings to express their thoughts, beliefs, and desires, that all languages meet the social, psychological, and survival needs of people who use them. In this sense, all languages, no matter how small and remote, are equal. All equally deserve study because all of them provide valuable insights into human nature.

Language structure;

Any language must have three building blocks;

1-     The first building blocks; a set of basic sounds, which linguists call phonemes. For example English has about 40 phonemes.

2-     The second building block is Morpheme which is the smallest unit in a language that carries a meaning. For example I, a, an, he, pre, per, -ed that shows the past tense.

3-     The third block is grammar of the language, which is a system of rules called semantics and syntax that enables us to communicate with and understand others. The semantics rule tells us to add -ed to the verb to express the action in the past, and the syntax is the order in which the sentence must be written or said. For example in English the adjective must precede the noun.

These three components of the language would exist in any of the 5000 languages known today in the world.

The first two elements which are phoneme and morpheme could be combined and reordered to from a numerous number of words. For example we have 616,500 words in oxford dictionary; all of these words are formed from the phoneme and morpheme.

The language development;

If we say that the average secondary school graduate knows some 80000 words, which we have acquired through the first 17 years of our life, yet we struggle to learn a new language after that age. How that could be? Let us look at how we learn our first language being infants or the speech development in human life;

The first stage is babbling stage, this stage begins at the age of three or four month old, in which the infants utter sounds unrelated to the household language, but these babbling include all languages. Eventually, our babbling comes to resemble the characteristic sounds and intonations of our household language. By the age of ten month old, the babies’ babbling is changed to the sounds and the phonemes which are heard only in household and the foreign babbling disappears. By the age of 12 month old, babies become deaf to any or phonemes comes form other language other than their native.

The second stage is the one-word stage, this stage starts at the age one or two years, during which a child speaks only one single word, he starts to use sounds to communicate meaning.  Children at this stage start to learn one word per a day.

The third stage is the two-word stage; it starts at the age of two. This early form of speech contains mostly nouns and verbs, like want juice. There is no three word stage, but children from the two word stage jump to utter longer phrases. By the age of five, the children now are able to communicate in full sentences and express themselves.