--- title: Languages and peoples on the map — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Languages and peoples on the map», a lesson of the geography course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Say "mother" in English, "mater" in Latin, "mat" in Russian and "madar" in Persian: they sound alike because these languages grew from --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/) / Languages and peoples on the map # Languages and peoples on the map Lesson 25 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 21 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/0/) — Say "mother" in English, "mater" in Latin, "mat" in Russian and "madar" in Persian: they sound alike because these languages grew from one ancient ancestor, like cousins who share a grandmother. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/1/) — Such a group of related languages is called a family. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/2/) — Languages travel with people. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/3/) — Latin spread with the Roman Empire and slowly became Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian; Arabic spread across North Africa after the 600s; Spanish, Portuguese, English and French spread with colonies and empires. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/4/) — About 7,000 languages are spoken today, and nearly half are endangered, because children grow up speaking a bigger language instead. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/6/) — When people with different first languages need to trade or rule, they use a shared one, a lingua franca, like Swahili on the East African coast or Persian at the courts of India. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/7/) — In Europa Universalis 5 each location gets one culture, painted in neat patches. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/8/) — Real places were rarely so tidy: towns spoke one language and villages another, courts used a third, and borders cut right through peoples such as the Kurds. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/9/) — About 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, but nearly half of them are endangered. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/10/) — Languages that grew from the same ancestor form a family, and English, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Persian all belong to the Indo-European family, while Mandarin Chinese belongs to a different family. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/11/) — English and Mandarin Chinese are the two languages with the most speakers in total, and Hindi and Spanish come next. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/12/) — Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian all grew out of Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/13/) — Arabic spread from Arabia across the Middle East and North Africa, as far as Egypt and Morocco, after the 600s, while Turkic languages spread from Central Asia west to Anatolia. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/14/) — Spanish is the main language of most of Latin America, Portuguese of Brazil, and English and French are official languages in many African countries. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/15/) — Many Indigenous languages are still spoken, such as Quechua by several million people in the Andes, Guaraní in Paraguay and Nahuatl in Mexico. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/16/) — Quechua was the language of the Inca Empire. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/17/) — Languages are written in different scripts, such as the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic (used for Russian), Arabic, Devanagari and Chinese characters, and Serbian can be written in both Cyrillic and Latin letters. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/18/) — A nation is a group of people who feel they belong together, often sharing a language and history, but many countries hold several nations and many nations are split by borders. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/19/) — The Kurds are a people of over 30 million without their own state, split mainly between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/20/) — A lingua franca is a shared language used between people who speak different first languages, such as Swahili in East Africa. - [21](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/25-languages-and-peoples-on-the-map/21/) — Persian was a language of poetry and government far beyond Persia, used at the courts of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals. - ← previous: [Population and cities](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/24-population-and-cities/) - next →: [Food and farming around the world](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/26-food-and-farming-around-the-world/) - ↑ back to [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/)