There are about 5,000 living languages and dialects around the world. The multilingualism of the Earth's population has developed for many reasons, for example, the disunity of the life of the ancient tribes, who lived in groups, and did not even suspect the existence of other people. Each tribe created its own so-called proto-language, which subsequently developed and branched out. There are about 13 such proto-languages in total.
People from different countries around the world speak different languages. Sometimes in one state there are several dozen languages and dialects, for example, in the United States in New York alone, people speak 129 languages and dialects. Distinguish between living (spoken), dead (for example, Latin) languages, the language of the deaf and dumb, artificial languages and even fictional, for example, elvish from J. Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings".
The common function of all varieties of languages is communicative. It is a means of sound, sign (written) and sign communication, information transfer.
Until now, there are two scientific hypotheses for the origin of languages, as well as many myths and legends. Some scholars suggest that all modern languages originate from one language, the so-called pro-world. However, it is not necessarily the primary language. There may have been other languages in the past that have become extinct. This linguistic hypothesis is called the theory of monogenesis.
The second hypothesis, the theory of polygenesis, is that the languages that exist today are descended from several proto-languages that were created and developed independently of each other. In any case, none of the concepts can be confirmed historically due to the long age and lack of evidence.
One way or another, the tribes that inhabited the Earth several millennia ago already spoke different languages. The planet's population grew, states were created, there were massive migrations and mixing of peoples, lands were seized, the social order changed. All these changes could not but affect the development of languages.
The tribes grew, branched out, mastered new territories, the same languages in different places developed in different ways, dialects appeared. Thus, nowadays it is already difficult to imagine that, for example, English and Russian languages belong to different branches (Germanic and Balto-Slavic) of the same language family - Indo-European. Its proto-language, Proto-Indo-European, arose about 5-6 thousand years ago.
There are 5,000, and according to some estimates, about 7,000, languages in the world. They are studied by the vast humanities of linguistics. Linguists study linguistic laws and derive general patterns, develop and supplement the existing classification. World languages have many common features, therefore linguistics studies similar tendencies of languages, analyzes them and deduces universal hypotheses characteristic of most known languages.
