Specific features of society linguistic structure

In the article linguistic structure of society was defined the as one of the few public institutions, associated with development and impact on society of languages: their total number, number of speakers, social functions, and social status. The issue was not in the structure of language as such, but in the society structure, specified by language features. The linguistic structure of society is very heterogeneous and characterized by large disparities in number of people speaking different languages - from few hundreds (tens) of thousands to several millions, hundreds, tens of people. In view of this fact linguistic structure of countries can vary from multilingual to monolingual. We first presented all the different types of world languages classification. The following types were identified: lingual-genealogical classification in which languages were combined on the basis of affinity; ethno-linguistic, it defined that division of human speech into separate languages historically linked with ethnic differentiation of world's population; and functionally-sociological classification. Also such component of language structure as language status was analyzed by us in detail.