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Language Families

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43 views1 page

Language Families

Uploaded by

victormakuto501
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor,

called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology,
with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic
trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists thus describe the daughter
languages within a language family as being genetically related The divergence of a proto-
language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with
different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus
becoming distinct languages over time.[2]
One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages,
including Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and many others, all of
which are descended from Vulgar Latin The Romance family itself is part of the larger Indo-
European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia, all
believed to have descended from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European.
A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates —
languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families
that contain one language. Inversely, there is no upper bound to the number of languages a
family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages, contain over 1000.[4]
Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound
changes are one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic
relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through the comparative
method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change
through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example,
the Mongolic, Tungusic, and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several
scholars to believe they were related. These supposed relationships were later discovered to be
derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. [5] Eventually though, high
amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to
derive any more relationships; even the oldest language family, Afroasiatic, is far younger than
language itself.[6]
Major language families
1. Niger–Congo (1,552 languages)
2. Austronesian (1,256 languages)
3. Trans–New Guinea (481 languages)
4. Sino-Tibetan (458 languages)
5. Indo-European (454 languages)
6. Australian (384 languages)
7. Afroasiatic (382 languages)
8. Nilo-Saharan (210 languages)

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