Language family

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Principal oral languages (no sign languages shown) families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families).
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages on earth.


Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular on how one classifies dialects. The 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages.[2] A "living language" is simply one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also many dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified, or are even unknown outside their respective speech communities.

Membership of languages in a language family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a "genetic" or "genealogical" relationship. The latter term is older.[3] Speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with the original speech community gradually evolving into distinct linguistic units. Individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process.[4]


Structure of a family

Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family. (Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade.) Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus in how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, and groups into complexes. A top-level (largest) family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to each other, the closer the languages will be related. This means if a branch off of a proto-language is 4 branches down and there is also a sister language to that fourth branch, than the two sister languages will be more closely related to each other rather than the proto-language.


For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Indo-Iranian language families are branches of a larger Indo-European language family. There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry[5] that was verified statistically.[6] Languages interpreted in terms of the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion).[7]

Dialect continua

Some closely knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take the form of dialect continua in which there are no clearcut borders that make it possible for unequivocally identifying, defining, or counting individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs for Arabic, the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as a single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language (a language isolate) to nearly twenty.



A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of isolate in such cases is usually clarified. For instance, Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language, spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In the latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. (Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family.)



Sometimes, however, a proto-language can be identified with a historically known language. For instance, dialects of Old Norse are the proto-language of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic. Likewise, the Appendix Probi depicts Proto-Romance, a language almost unattested because of the prestige of Classical Latin, a highly stylised literary register not representative of the speech of ordinary people. It is worth noting that although many languages are related through a proto-language, it does not mean that speakers of each language will necessarily understand each other. There are cases in which speakers of one language are able to understand and successfully communicate with their sister languages. But there are also cases where this is very one sided meaning that only one communicator is able to understand a language while the other cannot. An example of this would be many Spanish speakers can understand Italian however Italians are unable to comprehend what Spanish speakers are saying. Both of these languages share a proto-language but only bits are understood.

Other classifications of languages




Contact languages


See also


  1. Bruce M. Rowe, Diane P. Levine (2015). A Concise Introduction to Linguistics. Routledge. pp. 340–341. ISBN 1317349288. Retrieved 26 January 2017. <templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  2. "Ethnologue: Languages of the world" (Seventeenth ed.). Retrieved 5 November 2015. World Population 6,800,596,862 / Living Languages 7,106 / Institutional: 560, Developing: 1,563, Vigorous: 2,549, In Trouble: 1,519, Dying: 915<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  3. Müller, Max (1862). Lectures on the science of language: delivered at the Royal institution of Great Britain in April, May and June, 1861 (3rd ed.). London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts. p. 216. The genealogical classification of the Aryan languages was founded, as we saw, on a close comparison of the grammatical characteristics of each;....<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
  4. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (2011). Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 336. ISBN 9027287228. Retrieved 26 January 2017.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>

Further reading

  • Boas, Franz (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Volume 1. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology. ISBN 0-8032-5017-7.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>

External links