Language Family Definition and Examples

Language Family Definition and Examples A language family is a set of languages deriving from a common ancestor or parent. Languages with a significant number of common features in phonology, morphology, and syntax are said to belong to the same language family. Subdivisions of a language family are called branches. English, along with most of the other major languages of Europe, belongs to the Indo-European language family. The Number of Language Families Worldwide It is estimated that there are more than 250 established language families in the world, and over 6,800 distinct languages, many of which are threatened or endangered. (Keith Brown and Sarah Ogilvie,  Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the  World. Elsevier Science, 2008) The Size of a 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 there are many languages that do not appear to be related to any other. These single-member language families are referred to as language isolates. The Americas have been more linguistically diversified than other continents; the number of Native American language families in North America has been judged to be more than 70, including more than 30 isolates. (ZdenÄ›k Salzmann, Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Westview Press, 2007) Catolog of Language Families The website ethnologue.com catalogs the worlds 6,909 known living languages. It lists the major language families and their members and tells where they are spoken. The number of speakers of these languages varies from the hundreds of millions whose native tongue is English or Standard Chinese to the relatively small populations who speak some of the rapidly disappearing American Indian languages. (C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes,  A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. Wadsworth, 2012) Levels of Classification In addition to the notion of language family, language classification now uses a more complex taxonomy. At the top we have the category of a phylum, i.e. a language group which is unrelated to any other group. The next lower level of classification is that of a (language) stock, a group of languages belonging to different language families which are distantly related to each other. Language family remains a central notion, emphasizing the internal links between the members of such a family. (Renà © Dirven and Marjolyn Verspoor,  Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. John Benjamins, 2004)​ The Indo-European Language Family Indo-European (IE) is the best-studied language family in the world. For much of the past 200 years more scholars have worked on the comparative philology of IE than on all the other areas of linguistics put together. We know more about the history and relationships of the IE languages than about any other group of languages. For some branches of IEGreek, Sanskrit, and Indic, Latin and Romance, Germanic, Celticwe are fortunate to have records extending over two or more millennia, and excellent scholarly resources such as grammars, dictionaries and text editions that surpass those available for nearly all non-IE languages. The reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the historical developments of the IE languages have consequently provided the framework for much research on other language families and on historical linguistics in general. (James Clackson, Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2007)