Over the years since Grierson first proposed his scheme, it has appeared increasingly questionable, both as a consequence of his own somewhat arbitrary selection of linguistic criteria to distinguish between related local varieties of Indo-Aryan speech and as a result of increasingly sharp disagreements over the classification of languages and dialects in the region.
For instance, a comparative description of systems and regularities in their realisations as is exemplified by Matthiessen (2004) could be an important contribution to testing and validating the classification of languages into families.
This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology.
The categorical nature of our linguistic experience is directly reflected in the traditionally clear-cut linguistic classification of languages into tonal or non-tonal.
Therefore, we would like to argue that rather than a discrete categorical classification of languages into tone languages and non-tone languages, a more fine-grained account is needed [48] that takes into account the extent to which (in this case) pitch information is actually used to distinguish phonological categories in processing.
The PubMed search engine seems to be fairly accurate in the classification of languages of articles; indeed, we saw that the proportions of publications in English of Anglophone countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia were over 99%.
In the matrix of language distances, four different values were assumed, from 3 (in the comparison between groups speaking languages of different families) to 0 (in the comparison between localities where the same language was spoken), with intermediate values assigned on the basis of the hierarchical classification of languages reported in Ethnologue [ 33].
The final section discusses some issues concerning classifications of language attrition situations – L1 vs. L2, formally vs. informally acquired L2 – and their impact on the selection of a research design.
The most widely accepted classification of these languages follows.Cuitlatec (language isolate, extinct) [spoken in Guerrero]Huave (language isolate) [Oaxaca]Mayan Languages of the Mayan family are spoken in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Belize.
