Africa. Europe In foreign

2 Africa

Scientists consider Africa to be the birthplace of humanity - this is the very continent where people have lived "always". It is not known exactly who these ancient people were and whether any of their descendants still remain on earth. Today's Africa is divided into two unequal parts: North Africa and Tropical Africa, which begins South of the Sahara. North Africa is an ancient cultural area of the Mediterranean. Here once stood the city of Carthage, was the famous library of Alexandria,and even earlier-there was one of the oldest civilizations on earth - the Egyptian. The Egyptians built pyramids for their dead masters and invented hieroglyphs that were written on stone steles and papyrus scrolls. Language, distant relatives of Egyptians are satelitska, Chad, Berber and Cushitic peoples. All of them now make up the population of Northern and even parts of Tropical Africa, and their languages are United in one vast afrasian family. The most common of these languages today -

3 Australia and New Guinea The peculiarities of Australia are connected, first of all, with its remoteness from other countries and continents - remember the famous marsupials, which, except in Australia, are almost nowhere in the world. And the languages of Australia are also not like other languages of the world. At least they haven't found any relatives yet. In total, there are about two hundred languages in Australia; many of them are now on the verge of extinction - they are spoken by no more than a few hundred people. The relationship of different groups of these languages to each other is also not proven, so there are now more than ten different language families in Australia. The main and most numerous of them is one-this is semyapama-nyunga. Of the European languages in Australia, English is used primarily, of course, but Australian English differs from British English even more than American. For example, there is a different vowel system and, of course, a much different vocabulary. Only one narrow Torres Strait separates Australia

4 Asia

This is the largest part of the world; the languages spoken by the peoples who inhabit it are mostly ancient and well - known. Asia can be called a country of giant languages. We have seen that Africa and America are characterized by fragmented languages (think of the Indians of North America or the languages of West Africa!); in Asia, on the contrary, "super-languages" such as Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese are common, and smaller languages and peoples are often grouped around them. So, in all this vast space, there are four major families of languages. They are called as follows: Chinese-Tibetan Thai austroasiatic Austronesian. There are already more than a billion Chinese on earth, and they live not only in China, but also throughout Southeast Asia (for example, in Singapore, the Chinese population is more than seventy percent). It is interesting that in these countries, among foreign peoples and languages, the Chinese, as a rule, live quite isolated, do not mix with the indigenous people and always speak their own language

5 Europe In foreign

Europe, there are more than thirty countries and only about fifty languages. Of course, there are a lot of countries, and languages are negligible compared to other continents (think, for example, North America or Africa). Today's Europe is almost completely populated by representatives of different groups of Indo-Europeans (which is why they are called Indo-Europeans, by the way). But this was not always the case. Before various Indo-European peoples appeared on the territory of Europe (starting from the second Millennium BC), other people lived there. We know almost nothing about them: history has sometimes preserved only their names (like the Picts who once lived in what is now Scotland). The only surviving island from that ancient era is the Basque language, which lives in the North of Spain (in the Basque Country) and in the South-West of France, in Gascony (by the way, the word Gascony literally means "Basque Country", although the French who were born in these parts call themselves Gascons). The first Indo-Europeans in Europe were the Greeks

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