Language Family Trees

Language Family

• Collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history

Language Branch

• Languages related through common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago

Language Group

• Collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past & display relatively few differences in grammar & vocabulary

Language

• Organization of spoken words by which people communicate with each other with mutual comprehension

August Schleicher

• German linguist to compare world’s language families to a tree

• Three ways languages change1. Language divergence-lack of spatial interaction

among speakers of a language breaks the language into dialects & then continued isolation divides the language into discrete languages

• Examples: Spanish & Portuguese and now Quebecois French

• Each new languages is a leaf on the tree

2. Language convergence - peoples with distinctive languages have consistent spatial interaction, two languages can collapse into one.

3. Language extinction - creates branches on a tree with dead ends, representing a halt in interaction between the extinct language and the languages that continue

Indo-European Language Families

Germanic Branch• West Germanic Group

– High Germanic Subgroup – Southern German Mountains, standard German

– Low Germanic Subgroup – English, Dutch (Afrikaans) & Flemish

• North Germanic Group – Scandinavia (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic) all come from Old Norse which was the principle language spoken throughout Scandinavia before 1000 AD

Indo-Iranian Branch • 100 individual languages in the branch spoken by a billion people

• Indic Group (Eastern) 438 languages spoken in India. Group also includes Pakistan & Bangladesh

• Official language of India is Hindi. Spoken many ways, but only one official way to write it.

• Pakistan speak Urdu, spoken like Hindi but written with Arabic alphabet – most of the speakers are Muslim

Indo-Iranian Branch• Iranian Group (Western)

spoken in Iran & neighboring countries

• Iran main language is of Persian (sometimes called Farsi)

• E. Afghanistan & W Pakistan main language is Pashto

• Kurdish is used by the Kurds of W. Iran, N. Iraq & E. Turkey.

• These languages are written with Arabic alphabet

Balto- Slavic Branch

• East Group – most widely used Slavic languages.

• Russian is spoken by more than 80% of Russian people

• Russian is one of the 6 official languages of the UN

• Ukrainian & Belarusan are the two most common Eastern Slavic languages after Russian

•

Balto-Slavic Branch• West Group – Most

widely spoken West Slavic language is Polish, followed by Czech & Slovak

Balto-Slavic Branch

• South Group most widely used South Slavic languages are those spoken in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro & Serbia

• These were all a part of Yugoslavia & the language was Serbo-Croatian.

• Offensive classification today because it reminds the Bosnians & Croats of a time when they were dominated by Serbs

• Now languages represent the individual ethnic groups

• Bosnians & Croats used Roman alphabet

• Montenegrans & Serbs use Cyrillic alphabet (Serbia Србија)

Romance Branch

Romance Branch• Developed from the

Roman language 2000 years ago

• Four most common languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French & Italian (Spanish & French – official UN languages)

• Regions where these languages are spoken in Europe correspond somewhat to the boundaries of modern states

• Mountain serve as barriers

Origin & Diffusion of Romance Languages

• Latin varied from region to region in the Roman empire

• Latin that was spoken in the provinces was Vulgar Latin – referring to the masses of people– Horse in Latin was equus, in English equine– Vulgar term was caballus– Modern Italian cavallor, Spanish caballo,

Portuguese cavalo, French cheval & Romanian cal

• Following the collapse of Rome, communication with provinces further declined

• This created greater regional variations of Latin

• By the eighth century, regions had been isolated so long that distinct languages evolved

Romance Language Dialects• Difficult to determine whether two languages

are distinct or whether they are two dialects of the same language

• Romance languages spoken in former colonies can be classified as separate languages since they differ from the language introduced by Europeans

• Creole or creolized language - language that results from the mixing of a colonizer’s language with the indigenous language of people being dominated

Origin & Diffusion of Indo-European

• Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic & Indo-Iranian are from the same language family

• They should have a common ancestor, however a Proto-Indo-European ancestor cannot be proved

• This ancestor would have existed thousands of years before the invention of writing

• Common internal words for animals & trees in Indo-European languages lead linguists to believe these were things experienced in early lives of Proto-Indo-Europeans

• But other words show different roots, and would have been added after the root language split

• Linguists & anthropologists agree that Proto-Indo-European existed, but they do not know where

• Common theory – the first speakers were the Kurgans from the steppes of Russia & Kazakhstan

• Archaeological evidence dates the Kurgans to 4300 BC

• They were nomadic herders, domesticated horses and cattle

• This movement took them west through Europe & east to Siberia, conquering much of Europe & South Asia

Sedentary Farmer Hypothesis• Archaeologist Colin

Renfrew believes the Proto-Indo-European speakers came 2000 years before the Kurgans

• The location is present day Turkey – Anatolia

• The diffusion was from Anatolia westward to Greece, throughout the Mediterranean coastal areas

Section 3

Distribution of Languages• 1/2 of the world’s people speak an Indo-European language• 2nd largest family is Sino-Tibetan, spoken by more than 1/4 of

the world

Sino-Tibetan Language Family

• Spoken by 1.3 billion people in People’s Republic of China and smaller countries in Southeast Asia

• Sinitic Group – no single Chinese language.

• Most common language is Mandarin, referred to as “common speech” spoken by ¾ of Chinese people

• Written with logograms (ideogram, pictograms)

• Relatively small number of languages spoken in China is a source of national pride and unity.

• Enforced by a consistent written form

• Austro-Thai & Tibeto-Burman Branch Thai in Laos, Thailand & Burmese is Myanmar (Burma)

Japanese Language Family• Written in part with

Chinese logograms• Japanese uses two

systems of phonetic symbols like Western languages either in place of the logogram or along beside it

• Japanese although influenced by Chinese differs in its written form

Korean Language Family

• Not written with logograms

• System known as hankul – each letter represents a sound as in Western languages

• More than half the Korean vocabulary derives from Chinese words

Altaic Language Families

• Languages thought to have originated in the steppes bordering the mountains between Tibet & China

• Most widely spoken language is Turkish

• Written with a Roman alphabet

Uralic Language Family• Every European

country is dominated by an Indo-European language except three – Estonia, Finland & Hungary

• Settled in midst of German & Slavic speaking people & kept language as a major element of cultural identity

African Language Families• No one knows how many

languages are spoken in Africa, very hard to classify

• Results from 5,000 years of minimal interaction

• In the 1800s Europeans began to record African languages using a Roman or Arabic alphabet

• 1,000 distinct languages as well as several thousand dialects have been documented

• No written tradition to aid in documenting languages

African Language Families

• Niger-Congo Family• 95% of people in sub-Saharan

Africa speak a language from this family

• Swahili is the first language of 800,000 people & official language in Tanzania but spoken as a second language by 30 million Africans

• Nilo-Saharan Family• North-Central Africa• Khoisan Family• Southwest, clicking sounds• Austronesian Family• Spoken mostly in Indonesia• 722 active languages• Most widely spoken language is

Javanese – 85 million people

Afro-Asiatic Language Family• Semitic Branch• Arabic Language –

Spoken in N. Africa & SW Asia

• Language used to write the holy books of Islam

• Hebrew Language – spoken by Jewish population of Israel

• Language used to write the holy texts of Bible & Torah