Abstract
This chapter discusses the language characteristics, including language distributions, speaker populations, and the typological classification of languages. The similarities and dissimilarities among languages are analyzed in terms of spoken and written forms, and their relation and consequences for multilingual speech processing are discussed. Languages are usually classified according to two criteria: historical relatedness and linguistic characteristics. These two criteria may or may not be correlated. Languages that are usually grouped under the same genetic family may differ considerably in their grammatical characteristics. The sound structure of a language can be described in terms of its phonetic, phonological, and prosodic properties. The goal of phonetics is the descriptive analysis of sound acoustics, sound production, and sound perception, whereas phonology studies the functional, contrastive role of sounds in an entire system. Prosody spans both phonetics and phonology, and refers to phenomena such as pitch, stress, prominence, intonation, and phrasing that typically span several sound segments.
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