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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the protolanguage of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in aphylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. No actual biological relationship between speakers is implied by the metaphor. As of early 2009, SIL Ethnologue catalogued 6,909 living human languages.[1] A "living language" is simply one that is widely used as a primary form of communication by a specific group of living people. The exact number of known living languages varies from 5,000 to 10,000, depending generally on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular on how one classifies dialects. There are also many dead and extinct languages. Membership of languages in the same language family is established by comparative linguistics. Daughter languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship; the former term is more modern, while the latter is more traditional.[2] The evidence of linguisticrelationship is found in observable shared characteristics that are not attributed to borrowing. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language (or reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing(convergence). Membership in a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations, that is, common features of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the
entire family. For example, Germanic languages are "Germanic" in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the source of all Germanic languages.
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2 Other classifications of languages o o o 2.1 Isolate 2.2 Sprachbund 2.3 Contact languages
Proto-languages[edit source]
Main article: Proto-language The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly, since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative methoda reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher. This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families. For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European is not attested by written records, since it was conjectured to be spoken before the invention of writing. 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, Faroeseand Icelandic. Likewise, the Appendix Probi depicts Proto-Romance, a language almost unattested due to the prestige of Classical Latin, a highly stylised literary register not representative of the speech of ordinary people.
Isolate[edit source]
Main article: Language isolate Most of the world's languages are known to belong to language families. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates, which can be
thought of as minimal language families. An example is Basque. In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives, but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. Languages that cannot be reliably classified into any family are known as language isolates. 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, theBasque language is an absolute isolate: It has not been shown to be related to any other language despite numerous attempts, though it has been influenced by neighboring Romance languages. 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 its ancestor. In the latter case, it would make Basque and Aquitanian form a small family together (ancestors are generally not considered to be distinct languages for this purpose).
Sprachbund[edit source]
Main article: Sprachbund Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with the language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, etc.) might well be "areal features". However, very similarlooking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not a linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. A sprachbund is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian Subcontinent.
extensive lateral gene transfer: Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact, which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages. In addition, a number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another.
Constructed language Endangered language Extinct language Global language system ISO 639-5 Linguist List List of language families List of languages by number of native speakers Proto-language Tree model
Notes[edit source]
1. ^ "Ethnologue: Languages of the world, Sixteenth edition". Retrieved 8 June 2010, ISBN 978-155671-216-6 2. ^ Mller, 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;...." 3. ^ Henn, B. M.; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L.; Feldman, M. W. (17 October 2012). "The great human expansion". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (44): 17758 17764. Bibcode:2012PNAS..10917758H. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212380109. PMC 3497766. 4. ^ Sforza, LL; Minch; Mountain; Minch, E; Mountain, JL (1992 Jun 15). "Coevolution of genes and languages revisited". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 89 (12): 5620 4. Bibcode:1992PNAS...89.5620C. doi:10.1073/pnas.89.12.5620. PMC 49344. PMID 1608971. 5. ^ Gell-Mann, M.; Ruhlen, M. (10 October 2011). "The origin and evolution of word order". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (42): 17290 17295. Bibcode:2011PNAS..10817290G.doi:10.1073/pnas.1113716108.
Harrison, K. David. (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York and London: Oxford University Press.
Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
Ross, Malcom. (2005). Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages. In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples (PDF)
Ruhlen, Merritt. (1987). A guide to the world's languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978present). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 120). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 13, 16, 1820 not yet published).
Voegelin, C. F.; & Voegelin, F. M. (1977). Classification and index of the world's languages. New York: Elsevier.