Language Family

9 Key excerpts on "Language Family"

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  Everyday Linguistics

  An Introduction to the Study of Language

  • Joanne Cavallaro(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  proto-language is a hypothesized older language from which other languages have descended. Other linguists doubt this theory, believing that human language most likely has more than one origin. That debate and the ones about how language developed are likely to continue for some time, as there is little evidence to support a definitive answer. The time frame involved in trying to determine the origins of language, hundreds of thousands of years, means that we do not know much about any supposedly original language if one did exist.

  LANGUAGE SPREAD AND LANGUAGE FAMILIES

  We may not know much about possible languages from 100,000 years ago, but we do know something about languages spoken 5,000 years ago and how they spread. We talk about languages spreading, but of course it’s not so much languages that spread as the people who speak them migrate and take them into new environments that may or may not have speakers of other languages there. As they spread, languages invariably change, partly as a result of natural language change and partly as a result of speakers adapting to new environments and interacting with speakers of other languages.

  Linguists place languages into various language families. Language Family here is used metaphorically to describe the relationship among certain languages: a parent language with daughter languages that have evolved from that parent language and that are, therefore, related. When linguists say that languages are related, often referred to as a genetic relationship, they mean that those languages share a common ancestor language. For example, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Galician, Provencal, and Catalan, collectively known as Romance languages, are related in that they each evolved from Latin. Those relationships are fairly easy to trace as we have written records for hundreds, even thousands, of years. But what about when we have few or no written records, as is the case with languages spoken thousands of years ago? Can we reconstruct those familial relationships? Yes. In fact, linguists have done so for several language families.

  Indo-European Language Family

  The idea of a common ancestral language for languages of Europe had long been conceived of, but the work of Sir William Jones in 1786 provided evidence for it. As a judge in India for the British, Jones studied Sanskrit, an ancient language of India, after already having learned Latin and Ancient Greek. In the course of his study, he noticed many similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Ancient Greek. Jones posited a common source for them and for many other languages of Europe, India, and parts of the Middle East. His theory sparked further scholarship, with the eventual conclusion by scholars that most of the languages of Europe, as well as several in Iran, Afghanistan, and India, are related, all part of the Indo-European Language Family, having descended from a common language, what we now call Proto-Indo-European

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  Language, Culture, and Society

  An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

  • James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Anyone who knows Spanish will tell you that other languages, such as Portuguese or Italian, seem to be related to Spanish. This is due to their common origin from Latin. Traditionally, one of the most common activities in historical linguistics has been to classify languages according to these genetic relationships. It is difficult to give the exact number of languages spoken in the world at present, but the total undoubtedly approaches 6,000 (Krauss 1992:5–6), possibly 7,000. It is impossible to guess how many languages must have become extinct in prehistoric times. We do know that during the historical period for which we have written records, a great many languages have died out.

  Language Families

  A language family includes all those languages that are related by virtue of having descended from a single ancestral language. The concept of the Language Family is somewhat conservative: it is generally employed only if the relationship and the correspondences among the languages have been firmly established by careful comparative work and a convincing number of cognates. Subdivisions of a Language Family are usually referred to as branches. The Indo-European Language Family (see Chart 8.1), for example, consists of almost a dozen branches (some of which have sub-branches; note: not all the languages and subfamilies are given in this simplified chart). Some branches are Germanic (with about a dozen languages, including German and English), Celtic (with four languages), Romance or Italic (with about a dozen languages, including French and Spanish), and Balto-Slavic (with more than a dozen languages belonging to either the Baltic or Slavic sub-branches—including Russian and Polish). Some branches are represented by a single language, for example, Albanian, Armenian, and Hellenic or Greek. Indo-Iranian, with its Indic and Iranian sub-branches, consists of several hundred languages and dialects spoken mostly in southwestern Asia. Some branches of Indo-European, for example, the Tocharian and Anatolian branches, are no longer represented by spoken languages.

  CHART 8.1 THE INDO-EUROPEAN Language Family

  The number of languages that make up a Language Family varies greatly. The largest African family, Niger-Congo, is estimated to consist of about 1,000 languages and several times as many dialects. Yet some languages do not appear to be related to any other; these are referred to as language isolates

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  First Islanders

  Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia

  • Peter Bellwood(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Almost all the indigenous peoples of Island Southeast Asia today thus speak languages within the Austronesian family, except in pockets of eastern Indonesia close to New Guinea where a few Papuan languages are spoken. Otherwise, all other spoken vernaculars in Island Southeast Asia arrived or developed in the colonial era. These include Taiwanese (a Sinitic language) in Taiwan, other Sinitic and Indic languages in Malaysia and Singapore, and English in Malaysia and the Philippines. Indonesia no longer needs a colonial language because of the wisdom of the government of independence and its advisors in choosing a trader language, Malay, rather than the Javanese language of the ruling class as the national lingua franca (Bahasa Indonesia) in 1945.

  What is a Language Family, and Why are Language Families Important?

  Language families such as Austronesian are defined by lexical items and grammatical features that the constituent members have inherited directly from a period of common ancestry situated far back in time. Within each Language Family there will usually be a hierarchy of subgroups, with each larger subgroup incorporating two or more smaller ones. Each subgroup at any level will consist of a number of related languages deemed to relate more closely to each other than to any outsider language, and each subgroup will be defined by a series of innovations shared only by its members. “Sharing” in this sense depends, of course, on a demonstration through linguistic methodology that the item was inherited (cognate in linguistic terminology4 – for examples within Austronesian see Table 6.1 ), rather than borrowed from another language. Such subgroups develop as a Language Family radiates from an origin region and as the speakers of individual dialects move beyond the range of frequent communication and so develop linguistic innovations unique to themselves, their immediate neighbors, and their descendants, as related metaphorically in the opening quote for this chapter.

  Table 6.1

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  Linguistics

  • Anne E. Baker, Kees Hengeveld, Anne E. Baker, Kees Hengeveld(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The languages belonging to this family are, with the exception of Hungarian, spoken in parts of Northern Europe and Siberia. This family has two sub-families, one of which – the Uralic languages – is subdivided again. The names of the languages are printed in normal case, those of the (sub-)families in italics. Some of the languages, such as Chuvantsy, are no longer spoken. The Sami languages (North Finnish) are also called ‘Lappish’. This discussion of language families and the genetic relations between languages naturally leads to the question of the origin of language. Was there perhaps in the beginning one Proto-World language? If so, this would have to be placed at the very top of the pedigree of all the languages of the world. More than this we cannot say with any degree of certainty. Some researchers think that the predecessor of our own species of homo sapiens, the homo erectus who lived about two million years ago, had an elaborate and complex system for communication, perhaps some form of signing. From paleo-anatomical research it is plausible that the latest common ancestor of Neanderthals and homo sapiens, who lived about 400,000 years ago, was using some form of speech. 17.4 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Differences between languages can be related to differences between cultures. But before we discuss this in further detail, we must first define the notion of culture. Culture, as we will use the notion here, consists of what is usually called ‘high culture’: literature, music, painting, etc., but also the much wider domain of values, norms and customs of a society. This includes views on what is right and wrong, ideas about the education of children, and, wider still, the domain of ‘material culture’, that is, everything around us, both nature and all man-made products

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  A Concise Introduction to Linguistics

  • Bruce M. Rowe, Diane P. Levine(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This website, hosted by Dr. Jennifer Wagner, lists European languages and provides brief comparative analyses .
• International Association for World Englishes Inc. (IAWE): www.iaweworks.org . This organization focuses on global issues relating to language, literature, and pedagogy .
• KryssTal: www.krysstal.com/langfams.html . This provides information on most of the language families of the world and a bibliography of books on this topic .

Review of terms and concepts: historical linguistics

1. Historical linguistics is the study of _________________________________________ and __________________________.
2. The _______________________ model shows a protolanguage splitting abruptly into a number of daughter languages that appear to have no further contact with each other.
3. The ____________________ model shows the relative relationship of languages with a series of more and less inclusive circles around a group of languages.
4. The family tree model implies several things about how languages change over time. Two of them are represented by the _______________________ hypothesis and the __________________________ hypothesis.
5. One of the techniques of the comparative method is to look for words in different languages that have the same meaning and are very similar in their phonetic structure. Such pairs or sets of words are called____________________________.
6. Sometimes the phonetic characteristics of words in an ancestral language are: very similar to that in daughter languages, except that some sounds have uniformly changed from one sound to another in the daughter language. Such a change is called a____________________________________________________________________________________________.