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Language family

2005 map of the contemporary distribution of the world's primary language families

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.[1] 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.[note 1][3] 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]

  1. ^ Rowe, Bruce M.; Levine, Diane P. (2015). A Concise Introduction to Linguistics. Routledge. pp. 340–341. ISBN 978-1-317-34928-0. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  2. ^ Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (2011). Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages. John Benjamins. p. 336. ISBN 978-9-027-28722-9. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  3. ^ Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2013.
  4. ^ "Family: Austronesian". Glottolog 5.0. Retrieved 3 August 2024.
  5. ^ De la Fuente, José Andrés Alonso (2016). "Review of Robbeets, Martine (2015): Diachrony of verb morphology. Japanese and the Transeurasian languages". Diachronica. 33 (4): 530–537. doi:10.1075/dia.33.4.04alo.
  6. ^ Boë, Louis-Jean; et al. (11 December 2019). "Which way to the dawn of speech?: Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science". Science. 5 (12). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw3916. PMC 7000245.


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