Everything about Language Group totally explained
A
language family is a group of
languages related
by descent from a common ancestor, called the
proto-language of that family.
As with
biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics. An accurately identified family is a
phylogenetic unit (forming a linguistic
phylum); that is, all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family. Most of the world's
languages are known to belong to families; for many others, however, family relationships are not known or only tentatively proposed.
The concept of language families is based on the assumption that over time languages gradually diverge into
dialects and then into new languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than biological ancestry, because there are extreme cases of languages mixing due to
language contact in conquest or trade, whereas biological species normally don't interbreed. In the formation of
creole languages and other types of
mixed languages, there may be no one ancestor of a given language. In addition, many
sign languages develop in isolation and may have no relatives at all. However, these cases are relatively rare and most languages can be unambiguously classified.
The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly, since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it's possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the
comparative method—a 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 isn't attested by written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing.
Sometimes, though, a
proto-language can be identified with an 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 due to the prestige of
Classical Latin, a highly stylised literary dialect not representative of the speech of ordinary people.
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. However, the term
family isn't restricted to any one level of this "tree". The
Germanic family, for example, is a branch of the
Indo-European family. Some
taxonomists restrict the term
family to a certain level, but there's little consensus in how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into
groups, and groups into
complexes. The terms
superfamily,
phylum, and
stock are applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods.
Languages that can't be reliably classified into any family are known as
isolates. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as
Greek within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate; but the meaning of
isolate in such cases is usually clarified. For instance, Greek might be referred to as an Indo-European isolate. The isolation of modern Greek, however, isn't typical of its relationship to other languages at other times in its history. Several Greek dialects evolved out of the larger Indo-European language group; and later, Greek words influenced many other languages. By contrast, the
Basque language is a living modern language and a near perfect isolate. The history of its lexical, phonetic, and syntactic structures isn't known, and isn't easily associated to other languages, though it has been influenced by Romance languages in the region, like
Castilian Spanish,
Occitan, and
French.
Connections among and between language families are often used by
anthropologists, in combination with
DNA evidence and
fossil evidence, to help reconstruct pre-historic migrations of peoples, and other pre-historic events, such as the spread of agriculture.
The
Linguist List is now working on a National Science Foundation funded project entitled
Multitree, to build a database of all hypothesized language relationships, with a full searchable bibliography for each.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Language Group'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://language_family.totallyexplained.com">Language family Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
