{"id":5948,"date":"2009-11-25T18:53:14","date_gmt":"2009-11-25T17:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/?page_id=5948"},"modified":"2015-09-28T02:22:15","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T00:22:15","slug":"what-is-a-group-of-languages","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/en\/all-about-languages-%e2%80%8b%e2%80%8bin-the-world\/language-groups-throughout-the-world\/what-is-a-group-of-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a language family?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A language family is a grouping of linguistically linked languages, stemming from a common ancestral mother-language called Protolanguage<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Most languages in the world belong to a specific family. Languages that have no demonstrable relation with others, and cannot be classified within a specific family, are generally known as language isolates<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Creole languages<\/strong><\/em> are the only ones to be neither isolates, nor members of a linguistic family. They form their own different type of languages.<\/p>\n

Genetic links<\/h5>\n

If we compare, for instance, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, we discover a surprising set of resemblances, which give to these languages a \u201cfamily likeness\u201d.\u00a0 This \u201cfamily likeness\u201d does not appear when comparing French to German. But if one compares German to English, Dutch, Swedish or Danish, one finds another \u201cfamily likeness\u201d between these languages.<\/p>\n

The basic idea is that those languages look alike because all of them are different evolutions, \u201cdescendants\u201d from a same former language (also called \u201cprotolanguage\u201d), which does not exist anymore. We know the common origin (Latin<\/strong>) of the five languages we mentioned first, called romance languages<\/strong> whereas we don\u2019t have any written documents in the former language of the four languages we referred to after, called Germanic languages<\/strong>, but we can reasonably think that it existed. Linguists manage to set up genetic classifications by comparing languages and trying to define constant rules about their similarities (and differences). This method is called comparative linguistics<\/strong>. The classification of languages in groups of languages is called genetic classification: two languages belonging to the same group are genetically linked.<\/p>\n

Misleading resemblances<\/h5>\n

However, one has to pay attention. Resemblances between two or several languages may come from their genetic relationship (resembling shapes come from a common former shape) but they also may have others origins:<\/p>\n

– loans <\/strong>: the fact that the French word tomate<\/em> looks like the Aztec word tomatl <\/em>does not prove that these two languages are connected, but rather that they have been in contact.\u00a0 The name given to a new plant brought to Europe was the name people from its homeland had given it. Therefore, French \u201cborrowed\u201d a word from another language and adapted it to its vocabulary.<\/p>\n

– random <\/strong>: languages have limited sounds systems to express thousands of complex notions. \u00a0If we choose randomly two languages spoken far away one from another, we always find 3 or 4 words that look alike, in their shape and meaning.<\/p>\n

Therefore, one can speak about a genetic relationship only if one finds a converging set of resemblances, even partial, instead of a striking but isolated resemblance.<\/p>\n

Many families, large families<\/h5>\n

As ”\u00a0sister ” languages exist, coming from a common language spoken 1000 or\u00a02000 years ago, one can imagine ”cousin” languages coming from older languages. In the 19th century, by highlighting systematic and convergent similarities, some linguists showed the existence of a large Indo-European family, the first linguistic family to be identified, which includes Romance languages, Germanic languages, Slavonic languages, Greek and others (see the page about the Indo-European family). And if the similarities between French and Russian surprise you, try to compare French to Nepali, or Pachtoun to Kurdish! Nevertheless, they are Indo-European languages<\/strong>. To belong to the same family does not guarantee an obvious similarity, nor a standard level of comprehension between the speakers of these languages.<\/p>\n

Indo-European example list<\/h5>\n

Some group of languages can have many inner divisions. These divisions are sometimes called “families” or “sub-families” which can create a certain confusion. Several terms can be used to speak about the inner divisions, sub-divisions, sub-sub-divisions, etc. For the moment, there is no real consensus about their designation; they are called “group, branches, sub-groups, etc<\/strong> “. When a family gathers a large number of languages and inner divisions, we sometimes speak about “superfamily” or “macrofamily”. This is the case of the Niger-Congo <\/strong>family which is said to contain from 1300 to 1500 languages (the numbers vary according to sources), and represent between one fifth to one quarter of all the languages of the world.<\/p>\n

It is possible to group in the same family languages that are very distant geographically or even spoken on different continents. For instance, the Eskimo-Aleoute family gathers languages spoken in Eastern Siberia and on the other side of the pacific Ocean in Alaska, which are separated by thousands\u00a0 kilometers of ocean. In fact the Eskimo-Aleoute<\/strong> languages can be found in the furthest north of America, from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast and even in Greenland.\u00a0\u00a0In the same way that the languages of the Austronesian<\/strong> family are spoken all over the South Pacific, in South-east Asia and even in Madagascar, off the African continent!<\/p>\n

On the other hand, some regions in the world show a very large diversity and a great complexity in the genetic gathering of languages. For example,\u00a0though there are three families of languages in Europe, the whole American continent <\/strong>contains half the number <\/strong>of native languages families on the planet, though these 400 languages have about 25 million native speakers. Many families of Amerindian languages contain less than 15 languages. Papua-New Guinea<\/strong> (and Irian Jaya) has between 600 and 800 languages, gathered in about twenty families for a territory twice as large as France. It has to be noticed\u00a0that such diversities are partially due to the “isolation” of some people but also to the lack of information about these languages, which makes their classification difficult, as we will see later.<\/p>\n

On this website, we show about 120 language families<\/strong>. It must be underlined that there is no consensus on this number. We do not pretend that the classifications reported here are final or exhaustive. The classification of languages is a source of permanent debate between linguists, for different reasons we will explain later, and this is why the number of families, their denominations and their compositions may\u00a0vary from one source to another. What we present here is only an inventory of fixtures of the present knowledge, the most recent and the most consensual possible. When there are serious doubts about the classification of one or several languages in the same family, we decided to present it separately, more cautiously, but these classifications might change in the future.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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A language family is a grouping of linguistically linked languages, stemming from a common ancestral mother-language called Protolanguage. Most languages in the world belong to a specific family. Languages that have no demonstrable relation with others, and cannot be classified within a specific family, are generally known as language isolates. 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