Sister language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

In historical linguistics, sister languages are cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, the so-called proto-language.1 Every language in an established language family is a sister to the others. A commonly given example is the Romance languages, each one of which derives from Latin. Italian and French have about 89% lexical overlap, meaning the words share 89 percent of the same characteristics and root origins. Both Italian and French have a huge number of similar words. Similarly, Spanish and Portuguese have about 89% lexical overlap, so many words are shared or similar between those two languages (see also cognates). Spanish and Romanian's overlap is lower, at about 67%. Spanish and Portuguese have undergone Arabic influence and Romanian has undergone many different influences over the years, particularly from the Slavic languages. The Scots language is considered to be a sister language of English, as they are both descended from the common ancestor Old English. The phonological development of the two languages is divergent however, with different loanwords entering each language from sources such as Norse, Latin and French. Political and cultural events have largely dictated the decline of broad Scots as a standard variety in the modern period as Scots is currently confined to largely spoken use and unofficial functions.2

See also


  1. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2004). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. MIT Press. p. 128. ISBN 0-262-53267-0. 
  2. ^ Smith, Older Scots A Linguistic Reader, (Scottish Text Society: Edinburgh, 2012)

Creative Commons License