Question

1. What is the difference between a institutional language and an official language?
   
2. Complete the table below by first listing the 5 most spoken language families. Then, give an example of a language (hint: "the leaves") that belongs to each language family. Finally, explain where each language is spoken.

Language Family	Language Example	Where Language Family is Spoken

3. (FB)
   a) What is the most important language FAMILY (the trunk) in South America? ______________
   b) What is the most important language BRANCH of that family in South America? _____________
   c) What are the two most important INDIVIDUAL languages (the leaves) in South America? ________________

Answer 1

An institutional language is a language used in offices and workplaces, schools and colleges, forms of mass media, and government administration. Take India, for example. In India, English is an institutional language. At the same time, there are many institutional languages in India because of diversity in language.

An official language of a nation is one or more selected institutional languages, and Government uses such languages for the legislature, government reports and publications, currencies, road signs, and government procedures. Usually, people follow the official language to apply and avail government services and benefits. For example, in India, English, Hindi, and state level local languages like Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu are official languages.

Languages family is a way of organizing language and is a collection of languages connected through a common ancestral language that existed much before. Each family may consist of language branches and language groups within each branch. Language branch is a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language. Languages may exhibit similarities in vocabulary, grammar, and source of origin and Language group is the collection of such common languages.

A table of the 5 most spoken language families is here.

Sl No	Language Family	Language Example	Where Language Family is Spoken	Number of Speakers
1	Indo-European	English, German	Asia and Europe	3 billion
2	Sino-Tibetan	Chinese, Tibetan	Asia	1 billion
3	Niger-Congo	Swahili, Shona	Africa	500 million
4	Afroasiatic	Arabic, Somali	Africa, Asia, Europe	490 million
5	Austronesian	Malay, Javanese	Africa, Asia, Oceania	325 million

Data reference : Language family in Wikipedia

a) The most important language family in South America is Quechua. More than 7 million people in Peru, Bolivia, Colombo, Argentina, and Ecuador speak languages in this family.

b) The most important language branch of Quechua in South America is Quechua I or Central Quechua and spoken languages are Huaylas, Huaylla Wanca, and Conchucos.

c) The two most important individual languages in South America are Portuguese and Spanish.