10/14/2019 What is a Language Family?

• LinguaCore

What is a Language
Family?
Kevin Morehouse  April 4, 2017  0 comments

What is a Language Family?

How many languages are there?

It’s a common question, especially among language learners. It’s o en quoted nowadays that there
are more than 7 billion people on the planet, so it’s easy to wonder just how many languages all
these people use to communicate, and how many of them we could learn, if we really wanted to.

While the actual number can di er greatly according to one’s definition of language, an organization
known as SIL International (formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics) has worked for over eighty
years to catalogue the living languages of the world. The data has been collected and organized
within a single database, known as Ethnologue.

According to the current edition of Ethnologue (the 20th, published February 2017), there are
currently 7,099 languages in existence in the world today.

With such an abundance of languages in existence, you may be curious about how they all fit
together.

You may even have questions like:

What’s a language family?

What does it mean when two or more languages are related?
What does it mean when we group languages into categories like “Romance” Languages,
“Germanic” Languages, “Slavic” Languages, etc?

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In this article, we will take a deeper look into the interrelatedness of human language, and discover
how academic linguists have come to organize and understand how 7,000+ languages fit together,
not only today, but in the larger historical context to which we all belong.

Let’s examine the fundamental structure of language classification, the language family.

What is a Language Family?

You are a single, unique person. This cannot be disputed.

However, as unique as you are, you are still fundamentally tied with the rest of the human race by a
series of key relationships.

For example, no matter who you are, you have a father. You also have a mother. These people
created you, and you share a large number of traits with them both.

You may also have sisters and brothers. You share traits with them too, but your traits don’t come
from your siblings; they come from your parents.

Grouped together, your parents (mother and father) and their children (you and your siblings, if any)
form a social unit called a family. Your family is descended from families before it, in an
uninterrupted line of genealogical inheritance. Any children you have or will have will be descended
from you in the same way.

According to the field of historical linguistics, just as human beings can be grouped together into
genealogical families, so can human languages.

Of course, languages don’t reproduce as humans do, but they do evolve and change. Over time,
languages develop new traits and characteristics, while keeping some traits of their ancestral
languages. This evolutionary process allows for what is known as genetic classification or
genealogical classification of human languages.

The Evolution of a Language Family

Let’s look at how a language family develops, from the point of view of Latin.

Latin was the language spoken and spread by the Roman civilization for the bulk of its existence.

Latin, like its neighboring Greek, Germanic, and Celtic languages, (among others) was descended
from a proto-language known as Proto-Indo-European.

Latin reached prominence at the height of the Roman Empire, in the third century CE, the Latin-
speaking society covered a vast territory—from modern-day Spain, France, and Italy in the west, to
modern-day Romania in the east and beyond.

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Once the Empire fell around 476 CE, the once-unified territory broke apart, and the di erent regions
became isolated with one another. With less contact, the Latin spoken in each area began to develop
it’s own unique characteristics.

Over time, the parental language of Latin evolved into distinct daughter languages in each isolated
area. The Latin of Spain became Spanish, the Latin of France became French, the Latin of Italy
became Italian—so on, and so forth. The “o spring” of Latin are known as sister languages.

How Are Language Families Organized?

The relationship between Latin and it’s parent and daughter languages typifies the general
organization of language families:

A proto-language or ancestral language (a single language that is believed to exist, but is

unattested), gave rise to several daughter languages, which in turn became parent languages of
further daughter languages.

To make these connections easier to understand at a glance, linguists most o en organize them in a
visual aid known as a tree diagram, an evolutionary tree, or simply a language family tree.

If you’ve ever drawn a family tree of your grandparents, cousins, mom, dad, yourself and your
siblings, then you understand the basic organizational scheme: proto-language (last common
ancestor) at the top, connected to its daughter languages, which are in turn connected to their
daughter languages, (etc.) descending further and further down the chart until you reach the most
recent descendants of that proto-language.

Generally speaking, a language family tree can be broken up into smaller subdivisions. Each
subdivision of the language tree is known as a language branch. Back to our Latin example, while
Latin is a part of the Indo-European language family tree, it and all of its daughter languages form
their own branch of that tree, known as the Romance branch, or simply the Romance languages. A
tree-diagram of this branch is visible below:

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The Romance Branch of the Indo-European Language Family

Other well-known branches of the Indo-European Language family include:

Germanic Languages
Celtic Languages
Hellenic (Greek) Languages
Indo-Iranian Languages
Baltic Languages
Slavic Languages
among others

How Many Language Families Are There?

It is di icult to definitively determine how many language families are in existence today, or have
been in existence since the dawn of language.

This is due mostly to the fact that the history of human language predates recorded history, so the
existence of proto-languages can only be inferred, and not concretely proven. Additionally, deciding
which language families exist (and which languages belong to which families) is still a matter of
heated debate among historical linguists.

Though there is no definitive number of language families, Ethnologue lists a total of 145 language
families, not including unclassified languages, constructed languages, mixed languages, sign
languages, isolates, pidgins, and creoles.

Which Are the Major Language Families?

Despite the fact that there are over one hundred attested language families in existence, the rise of
globalization has lead to certain families dominating others in terms of numbers of speakers.

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The following is a table of the top ten major language families of the world, sorted by number of
speakers. (All statistics from Ethnologue, 20th edition).

1. Indo-European Languages (3,077,112,005 speakers)

2. Sino-Tibetan Languages (1,355,708,295 speakers)
3. Niger-Congo Languages (458,899,441 speakers)
4. Afro-Asiatic Languages (444,845,814 speakers)
5. Austronesian Languages (324,883,805 speakers)
6. Dravidian Languages (228,108,690 speakers)
7. Turkic Languages (172,371,468 speakers)
8. Japonic Languages (129,204,210 speakers)
9. Austroasiatic Languages (104,993,793 speakers)
10. Tai-Kadai Languages (80,886,958 speakers)

The Importance of Understanding Language Families

To understand the structure language family is to understand the history of human language on both
the micro and macro levels.

While language classification is a complex science that encompasses much more than the
information provided in this article, we know that the language family is the perfect starting point for
beginning to understand the interrelatedness of human languages.

With this knowledge, you can gain a quick grasp of the relationships between languages. If, for
example, you are asked to describe the relationships between Italian, Romanian, and Greek, you can
easily determine that they share certain base characteristics, as they are all Indo-European
languages. Just as easily, you can determine that Italian and Romanian are more closely related to
each other than they are to Greek, as the former two languages are part of the Romance branch,
while Greek is part of the Hellenic branch.

Use this knowledge to not only understand the history of language, but to understand how mastery
of one language in a certain family or branch can help you master other languages in that same
group. The more closely related two languages are, the easier—and faster—it will be to acquire both
in succession.

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