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What is a Language Family Tree?
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.
According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are:[citation needed] the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan family, mainly due to the many speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China.
Sound of Ancient Languages
Sound of Ancient Languages
Want to know how ancient languages sounded like? Take a journey back in time and find out!
Language Isolates
A language isolate is a natural language that has no known genealogical relationship with any other language. This means that it has no demonstrable connection to any other language family, and its origins remain unknown. As a result, language isolates present a unique challenge to linguists, as they cannot be classified into any existing language group.
Reasons to be an isolate:
the sole surviving language of a language family
no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationship with other languages
not related to any other at a family level according to Ross for Trans–New Guinea isolates
lack of data or no known speakers
One explanation for the existence of language isolates is that they might be the last remaining branch of a larger language family. The language possibly had relatives in the past which have since disappeared without being documented.
Another explanation for language isolates is that they developed in isolation from other languages. This explanation mostly applies to sign languages that have arisen independently of other spoken or signed languages. Isolate languages are often the subject of intensive studies in order to attempt proof of genetic relationships between languages. Basque, for instance, has been the subject of comparisons to the South Caucasian languages and the Indo-European language family.
Some languages are isolates because all the other languages in that language family have died. The Pirahã language of Brazil is one such language, the last language alive belonging to the Mura family. In contrast, there are languages whose relatives are spoken by communities a long distance away, because of past migrations. Such languages are not considered isolates.
Below is a list of known language isolates, along with notes on possible relations to other languages or language families:
Ainu - Endangered language.
Basque - No known relatives. Some linguists have attempted to show relationship with the Caucasian languages or Iberic.
Burushaski - Little information available.
Gilyak or Nivx - A Palaeosiberian language spoken in the lower Amur basin and on Sakhalin; Ainu is also spoken on Sakhalin.
Ket - No known relatives. Some linguists have attempted to show a relationship with Burushaski.
Korean - Possibly related to Japanese language, though not yet proven. Connections to the Altaic languages have also been proposed.
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