Linguistic Maps

Aspirated plosives

Aspirations occurs in English in initial onsets like in ‘pat’ [pʰæt], ‘tack’ [’tʰæk] or ‘cat’ [’kʰæt]. It is not phonemic, since it doesn’t distinguish meanings, but it’s distinctive in Mandarin e.g.  皮 [pʰi] (skin) vs. 比 [pi] (proportion). 

Non-phonemic aspiration occurs in: Tamazight, English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Kurdish, Persian, Uyghur. 

Phonemic aspiration: Sami languages, Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Mongol, Kalmyk, Georgian, Armenian, North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Hmong-Mien languages, Austroasiatic languages, Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Odya, Bengali, Nepali, Tai-Kadai languages, Nivkh, many Bantu languages (Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu, Venda, Tswana, Sesotho, Macua, Chichewa, and many Amerindian languages (Na-Dene, Siouan, Algic, Tshimshianic, Shastan, Mayan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixtec, Oto-Manguean, Quechua, Ayamara, Pilagá, Toba, etc.)

Tenseless languages

Language that do not possess the grammatical category of “tense”, although obviously, they can communicate about past or future situations, but they do it resorting to adverbs (earlier, yesterday, tomorrow), the context (pragmatics), but mostly aspect markers, that show how a situation relates to the timeline (perfective, continuous, etc.) or modal markers (obligation, need, orders, hipothesis, etc.)

Tenseless languages are mostly analytic/isolating, but some are not. They occur mainly in East and Southeast Asia (Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien), Oceania, Dyirbal (in NE Australia), Malagasy, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ewe, Fon and many Mande languages of Western Africa, most creole languages, Guarani, Mayan languages, Hopi, some Uto-Aztecan languages, and Greenlandic and other Inuit dialects. 

Orthographic depth

Languages have different levels of othographic depth, that means that a language’s orthography can vary in a spectrum of a very irregular and complex orthography (deep orthography) to a completely regular and simple one (shallow orthography). 

English, French, Danish, Swedish, Arabic, Urdu, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Chinese, and Japanese have orthographies that are highly irregular, complex and where sounds cannot be predicted from the spelling. These writing systems are more difficuld and slow to be learned by children, who may take years. In the medium of the scale there’s Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Greek, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Korean, where there are some irregularities  but overall the correspondence of one sound to one phoneme is not that bad. At the positive end of the scale there’s Italian, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish, Indonesian, Quechua, Ayamara, Guarani, Mayan languages, and most African languages (because there were no history of spelling, so a new one of scratch was made as very regular), they all have very simple and regular spelling systems, with usually a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. These are very easily learned by children. 

Orthographic depth has several implications for the study of psycholinguistics and the study of language processing and also acquisition of reading and writing by children. 

Note: remember that there’s no objective numbering on the three categories I made, there are more than just these three categories, because it works like a spectrum. Three categories were used just as a means for simplification. 

Plural Marking typology

How languages mark the plural number on nouns. 

Many Bantu languages use a prefix system (also with gender).

Most Indo-European languages have suffixes, although the Germanic languages, and, to a lesser extent French, have a mixed strategy that involves apophony/umlaut, and in the case of French, many irregular plurals, that totaly change the pronounciation of the word. 

Arabic, Berber, Hebrew, some Nilo-Saharan languages have this mixed strategy with vowel changes in the middle of the words, and suffixes. 

Dinka and Nuer (South Sudan) have only a stem change (apophony). 

A few African languages just change the tone of the word. French, Tibetan, Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Philippines’ languages and many Polynesian languages, and the Mande languages West Africa, use a particle before the noun, usually. In French this is the definite article la/le vs. les, because the final -s of nouns is not pronounced, so the plural is only noun in the spoken language from this particle. 

Indonesian and Malay have full reduplication (orang - person; orang-orang - people). 

Many East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai) don’t mark plural at all. 

Lexicon map - The word for “tea” in the world’s languages

Two main sources: from Sinitic “cha” or from Min Nan “te” 

Existential constructions

An existential construction is like the English verb “there to be” in the sentence “There are many countries”. 

Possessive existential: uses the verb “to have” like in French “il y a” (lit. it there has”, or Brazilian Portuguese “não tem jeito” (there’s no way, lit. not has way), or in Serbo-Croatian, and many southeast Asian and Chinese languages, and Swahili. 

Copula existential: uses the verb “to be” or an equivalent, like English “there is/are”. Most Slavic, Baltic, Uralic, Mongolic and Indo-Iranian languages work like this. Also, Korean, many Germanic languages, Iraqi Arabic, Kannada (Dravidian, in India), Mixtec languages, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Georgian. 

Existential verb: Portuguese, Spanish, Sardinian, Catalan, Occitan, Yoruba, Malay-Indonesian have a special existential verb. For example in Portuguese is “haver” and Spanish “haber”. In Portuguese (and only in he formal register in Brazilian variety) there’s “há um problema” (there is a problem) in which “haver” means exactely “there to be” and nothing else (although it’s also an auxiliary verb with a multitude of grammatical functions). Etymologically “haver/haber” meant “to have” (btw, despite the similarity with English, the verbs are not related).

Other verb: Dutch, German, Swedish, Japanese, Hausa and Somali have another verb which is used for this meaning. In German is “gibt” (give), and in Swedish is “finnas” (to find).

Adjective: for most Tukic languages it’s an adjective “var” (or some related word), which in fact works like a particle. 

Locative existential: it appears in Maori, Maltese, Tunisian and Lybian Arabic, as a place adverb. lt co-occurs with other types like in English “there”, French “y”, Catalan “hi”, Italian “ci”, and there’s also a locative preffix in Swahili. 

Prepositional pronouns: a pronoun fused with a preposition, it occurs as “fi” (with it/him) in some Arabic languages/dialects. 

If you know the languages left in Blank please write in the comments. 

Languages present on Duolingo! (as of 16 nov. 2017)

Dark green - languages available on Duolingo (mainly for English speakers) - Recent additions: Chinese, Korean, Japanese. 

Light green - languages soon to be released (Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian/Malay)

(A few conlangs are present: Esperanto, High Valyrian, and Klingon will soon be released too)