8. How are present-day languages related?
Description
This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
8. How are present-day languages related?
[--Scott DeLancey]
This is an INCOMPLETE list of some of the world's language families. More
detailed classifications can be found in Voegelin and Voegelin, CLASSIFICATION
AND INDEX OF THE WORLD'S LANGUAGES (1977), and M. Ruhlen, A GUIDE TO THE
WORLD'S LANGUAGES (1987). (Note: Ruhlen's classification recognizes a
number of higher-order groups which most linguists regard as speculative).
A language family is a group of languages that have been proven to have
descended from a common ancestral language. Branches of families likewise
represent groups of languages with a more recent common ancestor. For
example, English, Dutch, and German have a common ancestor which we label
Proto-West-Germanic, and thus belong to the West Germanic branch of Germanic.
Icelandic and Norwegian are descended from Proto-North Germanic, a separate
branch of Germanic. All the Germanic languages have a common ancestor,
Proto-Germanic; farther back, this ancestor was descended from Proto-Indo-
European, as were the ancestors of the Italic, Slavic, and other branches.
Not all languages are known to be related to each other. It is possible that
they are related but the evidence of relationship has been lost; it's also
possible they arose separately. It is likely that some of the families
listed here will eventually turn out to be related to one another.
While low-level close relationships are easy to demonstrate, higher-order
classification proposals must rely on more problematic evidence and tend to
be controversial. Recently linguists such as Joseph Greenberg and Vitalij
Shevoroshkin have attracted attention both in linguistic circles and in the
popular press with claims of larger genetic units, such as Nostratic
(comprising Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic) or
Amerind (to include all the languages of the New World except Na-Dene and
Eskimo-Aleut). Most linguists regard these hypotheses as having a grossly
insufficient empirical foundation, and argue that comparisons at that depth
are not possible using available methods of historical linguistics.
This list isn't intended to be exhaustive, even for families like Germanic
and Italic. Nor is it the last word on what's a "language"; see question 12.
Note: English is not descended from Latin.
English is a Germanic language with a lot of Latin vocabulary,
borrowed from French in the Middle Ages.
INDO-EUROPEAN
GERMANIC
North Germanic: Icelandic, Norwegian / Swedish / Danish
East Germanic: Gothic (extinct)
West Germanic: English, Dutch, German, Yiddish
ITALIC
Osco-Umbrian: Oscan, Umbrian (extinct languages of Italy)
Latin and its modern descendants (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Catalan, Rumanian, French, etc.)
CELTIC
P-Celtic: Welsh, Breton, Cornish
Q-Celtic: Irish, Scots Gaelic, Manx
Some extinct European languages were also Celtic, notably those of Gaul
HELLENIC: Greek (ancient and modern)
SLAVIC: Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, etc.
(not Rumanian or Albanian)
BALTIC: Lithuanian and Latvian
INDO-IRANIAN
Indic: Sanskrit and its modern descendants (Hindi-Urdu,
Gypsy (Romany), Bengali, etc.)
Iranian: Persian (ancient and modern), Pashto (Afghanistan), others
ALBANIAN: Albanian
ARMENIAN: Armenian
TOKHARIAN (an extinct language of NW China)
HITTITE (extinct language of Turkey)
AFRO-ASIATIC
SEMITIC: Arabic, Hebrew (not Yiddish; see above), Aramaic, Amharic
and other languages of Ethiopia
CHADIC: languages of northern Africa, e.g. Hausa
CUSHITIC: Somali, other languages of eastern Africa
EGYPTIAN: Ancient Egyptian
BERBER: languages of North Africa
NIGER-KORDOFANIAN: includes most of the languages of sub-Saharan
Africa. Most of the languages are in the NIGER-CONGO branch; the
most widely known subgroup of N-C is BANTU (Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, etc.)
URALIC
Finnish, Estonian, Saami (Lapp), Hungarian, and several
languages of central Russia
MONGOL: Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmuck, etc.
TURKIC: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and other languages of Central Asia
TUNGUSIC: Manchu, Juchen, Evenki, Even, Oroch, and other languages of NE Asia
Some linguists group these three families together as ALTAIC.
Rather more controversially, some add Korean and Japanese to this group.
It has been claimed that URALIC and ALTAIC are related (as URAL-ALTAIC),
but this idea is not widely accepted.
DRAVIDIAN: languages of southern India, including Tamil, Telugu, etc.
SINO-TIBETAN
SINITIC: Chinese (several "dialects", or arguably distinct languages:
Mandarin, Wu (Shanghai), Min (Hokkien [Fujian], Taiwanese),
Yue (Cantonese), Hakka, Gan, Xiang
TIBETO-BURMAN: Tibetan, Burmese, various languages of Burma,
China, India, and Nepal
AUSTROASIATIC
MON-KHMER: Vietnamese, Khmer (Cambodian), and various minority
and tribal languages of Southeast Asia
MUNDA: tribal languages of eastern India
AUSTRONESIAN
Malay-Indonesian, other languages of Indonesia (Javanese, etc.)
Philippine languages: Tagalog, Ilocano, Bontoc, etc.
Aboriginal languages of Taiwan (Tsou, etc.)
Polynesian languages: Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan, Tahitian, etc.
Micronesian: Chamorro (spoken in Guam), Yap, Truk, etc.
Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar)
Most of these languages fall in a branch called MALAYO-POLYNESIAN
JAPANESE: A number of linguists argue that Japanese is ALTAIC; others,
that it is most closely related to AUSTRONESIAN, or that it represents
a mixture of AUSTRONESIAN and ALTAIC elements.
TAI-KADAI: Thai, Lao, and other languages of southern China and
northern Burma. Possibly related to AUSTRONESIAN.
An outdated hypothesis that TAI is part of SINO-TIBETAN is still
often found in reference works and introductory texts.
AUSTRALIA: the Aboriginal languages of Australia are conservatively
classified into 26 families, the largest being PAMA-NYUNGAN, consisting
of about 200 languages originally spoken over 80-90% of Australia.
A large number of language families are found in North and South America.
There are numerous proposals which group these into larger units, some of
which will probably be demonstrated in time. To date no New World language
has been proven to be related to any Old World family. The larger North
American families include:
ESKIMO-ALEUT: two Eskimo languages and Aleut.
ATHAPASKAN: most of the languages of Alaska and northwestern Canada,
also includes Navajo and Apache. Eyak (in Alaska) is related to
Athapaskan; some linguists put these together with Tlingit and Haida
in a NA-DENE family.
ALGONQUIAN: most of Canada and the Northeastern U.S., includes
Cree, Ojibwa, Cheyenne, Blackfoot
IROQUOIAN: the languages of NY state (Mohawk, Onondaga, etc.) and Cherokee
SIOUAN: includes Dakota/Lakhota and other languages of the Plains
and Southeast U.S.
MUSKOGEAN: Choctaw, Alabama, Creek, Mikasuki (Seminole) and other
languages of the southeast U.S.
UTO-AZTECAN: a large family in Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.,
includes Nahuatl (Aztec), Hopi, Comanche, Paiute, etc.
SALISH: languages of Washington and British Columbia
HOKAN: languages of California and Mexico; a controversial grouping
PENUTIAN: languages of California and Oregon; also controversial
Work on documentation and classification of South American languages still
has a long way to go. Generally recognized families include:
ARAWAKAN, TUCANOAN, TUPI-GUARANI (including Guarani, a national language
of Paraguay), CARIBAN, ANDEAN (including Quechua and Aymara)
LANGUAGE ISOLATES: A number of languages around the world have never been
successfully shown to be related to any others-- in at least some cases
because any related languages have long been extinct. The most famous
isolate is Basque, spoken in northern Spain and southern France; it is
apparently a survival from before the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.
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