Languages & Linguistics
Language Family
A language family is a group of languages that are historically related and share a common ancestor. These languages have evolved over time, resulting in similarities in vocabulary, grammar, and phonology. Linguists classify languages into families to better understand their development and relationships, which can provide insights into the history and migration patterns of different populations.
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9 Key excerpts on "Language Family"
eBook - PDFInductive Semantics and Syntax
Foundations of Empirical Linguistics
- Leo Zawadowski(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
: languages constitute a family if they are continuators (or continua-tions, or successors) of one language. 1.2. This definition defines the family relationship between some languages existing at a given period by their relation (viz. common origin) to a previous fact. Namely: 1 A. Meillet, Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, 2e éd. (Paris, 1926) ( — LHG), 13. Cf. ibid. 77-78. Cf. Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, Tome II (Paris, 1938) ( =LHG II). A. Meillet, Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indoeuropéennes, 8e éd. corr. (Paris, 1937) {=Introd.), 16. 256 RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LANGUAGES each of the languages A,B,C,D, has a diachronic succession relation (we do not yet know in what it consists) to its predecessor language. Their family relationship consists in having a COMMON predecessor. It is seen that the definition in question defines Language Family relationship as a non-spatio-temporal relation between some synchronic terminals ( A,B,C,D ) consisting in their being second terminals of a dia-chronic relation of a particular kind (that of succession) while the first terminal is identical for all the four languages in question. These relations may be represented by the following graphs: Virst terminals flamini t a n l n a l s diachronic i relation ot succession terminals Qg and Lj do not constitute a family f i r s t terminal diachronic relation of succession VAv/ Family ralatlonshlp (= klnshlp;jsoa-dlachronlo) A, 8, C, D constitute a f u l l y These graphs represent what is communicated in the current definition in its corrected form. They neither assert that such relations exist, nor — still less — prove it (how-ever, anticipating what will be set forth below, we do assert it; the proofs will be given at an appropriate place below: 267). It is seen that in the current definition of Language Family, synchronic and diachronic features are intervowen in a rather complicated way.
eBook - PDFThe Origin of Language
Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
- Merritt Ruhlen(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Gorgias Press(Publisher)
2 Language Families What is Known We have seen how the comparison of even a few words can lead to the grouping of certain languages, on the basis of fairly obvious similarities; such a group of related languages is called a Language Family. In Chap- ter 1 we identified the Indo-European family, which includes most of the languages of Europe and extends into southwestern Asia as far as India. Over the past five centuries, of course, Indo-European languages have been widely dispersed around the world, following the voyages of exploration and conquest. English has largely supplanted the native languages in North America, New Zealand, Australia, and various smaller localities around the world; Spanish has replaced the indigenous languages of Central and South America and some of the larger Caribbean islands; Portuguese has been spread to Brazil and parts of Africa; French was transplanted to parts of North America and the Caribbean, including Quebec, Louisiana, and Haiti, and to parts of Africa; and Russian has expanded eastward through Asia as far as the Pacific coast. But when we speak of the distribution of languages and language families in this book, it should be understood that we are referring to the Pre-Columbian distribution, not the modern one. We also identified the Semitic family of the Middle East and North Africa, and we saw that the Turkish language belongs to neither of these two families. Rather, Turkish belongs to the Turkic family, as an examination of further Turkic languages (for example, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh) 30 The Origin of Language would quickly reveal. In the present chapter you will be asked to classify languages—to iden- tify language families—from other parts of the world. You will be pre- sented with tables of languages from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and you will be asked to classify these languages into families, just as you did with European languages in the previous chapter.
eBook - PDFFirst Farmers
The Origins of Agricultural Societies
- Peter Bellwood(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
As linguist Harry Hoenigswald (1969) noted perceptively more than half a century ago when discuss- ing the Indo-European family: Hittite and Tokharian …. are now extinct; there are other splinters, barely known to us, of which the same is true, and we may conjecture, though with meagre profit, that there were many additional groups, now lost without a trace. Other language families that have witnessed a similar erasure of the traces of their pasts due to the expansion of phylogenetically unrelated languages, either from within the family or from without, include Austroasiatic in Southeast Asia, Nilo-Saharan in Africa, Dravidian in South Asia, and many American families that suffered massive What Do Language Families Mean for Human Prehistory? 227 depopulation and language loss after 1492 CE, up to 90% in population terms in some regions because of introduced Old World diseases (Koch et al. 2019). All these families now have broken geographical distributions and often quite contested homelands, a situation not assisted by the absence of detailed historical records that can inform about homeland issues. “Complete” phylogenies are difficult to create for these lan- guage families, Bayesian statistics notwithstanding, and it is quite possible that such issues will never be fully resolved. How Did Languages and Language Families Spread? Language spread without a significant movement of people is seemingly a rare phenomenon in North America. (Foster 1996, p. 67) … the most eminent judgement to emerge from our global survey is that migrations of peoples, the first force in history to spread languages, dominates to this day. (Ostler 2005, p. 143) Linguists often assume that a true Language Family, one which can be shown by the comparative study of shared innovations to be internally structured genetically, with an array of reconstructed proto-languages, must owe its existence to some kind of population expansionary process.
eBook - PDFAll in the Family
On Community and Incommensurability
- Kennan Ferguson(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Duke University Press Books(Publisher)
Chapter 7 FAMILIAR LANGUAGES Families differ profoundly, yet the terminology of family proves strong enough to encompass their wide arrays of re-lationships. This final chapter returns to language as the source of these strengths (and potential weaknesses): what dynamics of terminology and representation closely mirror the energetic, restrained, and agentic aspects of familial life and, to extrapolate further, of political life within and between communities? This connection between familial relationships and linguis-tic theory emerges in part from the problematic similarities and incommensurabilities that language allows; both con-tain many of the same false oppositions of freedom and rules, commitment and creativity, community and difference. In-ternal rules or grammars of language teach something about familial roles and political logics. One kind of utterance hav-ing a normative and significatory coincidence with another (though each may point to entirely different regulatory and policy ends) illuminates aspects of intention, collectivity, and individuality that exemplary cases of family have already highlighted. 126 CHAPTER 7 This connection also draws upon and revives certain contentions within political theory, laying out the phratric likenesses between conten-tions within 1970s social philosophy and the arguments so far made in this book. The debates that emerged from the recognition that both politics and philosophy take place within and through language are neither dead nor gone, but oftentimes merely forgotten. That language participates in what J. L. Austin memorably termed “speech acts” was recognized as a social and political claim early on by theorists such as John Searle and Charles Taylor, but what became of those recognitions remains implicit in many of the continuing debates concerning methods and empiricism.
No longer available |Learn more- Robert McColl Millar, Larry Trask(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
In spite of its obvious advantages, however, the wave model also possesses a few shortcomings. Most obviously, it does not allow us to represent earlier and later stages of languages at the same time, something that the tree diagram does very easily. Wave diagrams are also tedious and cumbersome to prepare and to draw, and they are much harder on the eye. In practice, therefore, historical linguists generally use wave diagrams only when we want to draw attention to particular facts that cannot otherwise be easily presented; the rest of the time we use the simpler and more vivid trees. Neither system of analysis is terribly useful in describing the effects of language contact upon a particular member of a dialect continuum. We will approach this point in a number of ways in the later chapters.7.5 The language families of the worldAfter some two centuries of comparative work, historical linguists have been quite successful at classifying the world’s 6,000 or so living languages, plus a number of recorded dead languages, into genetic families, often with a good deal of internal subgrouping. The majority of languages in the Old World have been assigned to scarcely more than a dozen families, some of them very large, although there remain some problem areas. The New World has so far proved much more difficult: even though it has far fewer languages than the Old World, specialists currently recognize 140 or more distinct American families. No doubt further research will reduce this number to some extent, but it really does appear that the Americas are linguistically far more diverse than most of the rest of the world, although minority views would claim the opposite.Here I will briefly review some of these families. I begin with the vast Indo-European family. This family is conventionally divided into ten branches, some of them much larger than others. The ten branches are as follows:• Germanic (discussed above).• Italic (discussed above, with all surviving Italic languages belonging to the Romance group).• Celtic, divided into two branches: Brythonic, including Welsh, Breton and the extinct Cornish, and Goidelic
- Kennan Ferguson(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Duke University Press(Publisher)
Chapter 7 FAMILIAR LANGUAGES Families difer profoundly, yet the terminology of family proves strong enough to encompass their wide arrays of re- lationships. This fnal chapter returns to language as the source of these strengths (and potential weaknesses): what dynamics of terminology and representation closely mirror the energetic, restrained, and agentic aspects of familial life and, to extrapolate further, of political life within and between communities? This connection between familial relationships and linguis- tic theory emerges in part from the problematic similarities and incommensurabilities that language allows; both con- tain many of the same false oppositions of freedom and rules, commitment and creativity, community and diference. In- ternal rules or grammars of language teach something about familial roles and political logics. One kind of uterance hav- ing a normative and signifcatory coincidence with another (though each may point to entirely diferent regulatory and policy ends) illuminates aspects of intention, collectivity, and individuality that exemplary cases of family have already highlighted. 126 CHAPTER 7 This connection also draws upon and revives certain contentions within political theory, laying out the phratric likenesses between conten- tions within 1970s social philosophy and the arguments so far made in this book. The debates that emerged from the recognition that both politics and philosophy take place within and through language are neither dead nor gone, but ofentimes merely forgoten. That language participates in what J. L. Austin memorably termed “speech acts” was recognized as a social and political claim early on by theorists such as John Searle and Charles Taylor, but what became of those recognitions remains implicit in many of the continuing debates concerning methods and empiricism.
eBook - PDFThe Indo-European Language Family
A Phylogenetic Perspective
- Thomas Olander(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
2 Methodology in Linguistic Subgrouping James Clackson 2.1 Introduction If two or more languages form a subgroup of a Language Family, what does it mean? To answer this, it will be helpful to consider the case of three related languages, A, B and C. I shall assume that these three languages are all spoken at the same point in time and are all derived from an unattested proto-language, which I shall call Proto-ABC (I shall also refer to the Language Family as ABC). If the languages A and B form a subgroup within ABC, this means that it is possible to reconstruct a stage intermediate between Proto-ABC and languages A and B, which I shall call Proto-AB. To put this in other words, there existed a community of Proto-AB speakers at the time when a separate speech com- munity spoke Proto-C, the language ancestral to C. The situation can thus be represented as in Figure 2.1, where languages are placed in a relationship to one another, much as with a family tree of genealogical descent. 1 Diagrams such as Figure 2.1 are accordingly called “tree diagrams”. 2.2 The History of Subgrouping The recognition of subgroups of the Indo-European Language Family precedes the recognition of the Language Family itself. Scaliger (1610) was already able to recognise the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families of languages, matrices linguarum in his terms, from shared vocabulary (notoriously using the word for ‘god’ as a diagnostic), and earlier scholars had grouped several languages as one in order to preserve the Biblical notion of seventy-two languages of the world. 2 From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first scholars of Indo- European operated with subgroups such as Germanic and Slavonic. Thomas Young, in the same article which saw the first use of the term “Indo-European” arranged the languages of the world into a three-step hierarchy: classes (of 1 Hoenigswald (1966: 3–5) discusses more complicated arrangements between three putative languages A, B and C.
eBook - PDFFor the Love of Language
An Introduction to Linguistics
- Kate Burridge, Tonya N. Stebbins(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Without sound change regularity, the comparative method would not be viable. 366 PART 4: Variation and change HOW DO LANGUAGE FAMILIES ARISE? The concept of genetic relatedness between languages had been bandied about for a long time, but it wasn’t until a lecture in 1786 that the idea really took off. Sir William Jones argued that the ancient languages Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin were related, and could be traced back to ‘some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’. Jones was arguing for Proto-Indo-European (known fondly as PIE), the parent of most of the languages of Europe, south-western Asia and northern India (assumed to be spoken sometime around 3000 bce). It is a bit unfair to give all the credit to Jones here, since others had made similar observations. But, it was Jones who really advanced the idea of a hypothetical proto-language – up until then, most scholars had been arguing for one of the existing classical languages as the parent. PIE has left us no written records because writing hadn’t been invented then, but we know it must have existed because of the regular correspondences between the sound systems of these languages. Jones’ ideas were enthusiastically taken up by other scholars, and before long the system- atic study of language evolution was undertaken for the first time. It was this work that led to the classification of all the Indo-European languages into the sort of genealogical tree you see in Figure 11.9. To get an idea of how language families evolve, imagine the conditions that might have given rise to the Germanic family of languages. Roughly around 1500 bce, a bunch of speak- ers left the Indo-European homeland – perhaps there were disputes or the population got too big for the area to support, or maybe they simply had an adventurous spirit. All languages change, but they are more likely to change when they are in different places.
eBook - PDF- Tadeusz Milewski, M. Brochwicz(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
11. HISTORICAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD 113 a manner consistent with the pattern of development of the Romance family, which is substantiated by written texts. Besides families, we distinguish other, looser language groups, which we call leagues. They are made up of languages of different origin which, owing to centuries of mutual contact and influence, have become closer to one another, not only as regards vocabulary, but also in the structure of their phonological, morphological and syntactic systems. The Balkan league has already been cited as an example of this type of grouping (cf. page 100). Cycles, or chains, of languages constitute even looser groupings. In this case, one family borders another and, as a result of the shifting boundaries between them, a transitional region of vital mutual contact arises. The language system of such a zone demonstrates features originating from both families. In this way, both families are connected with each other like links in a chain by the transitional zone of the languages. The languages shown on the map of the world constitute two great strata—the older, which underwent expansion before the 15th century A.D., and the younger, which became superimposed on the previous stratum after the 15th century. These two strata disseminated along different routes and in different conditions. The languages of the earlier stratum disseminated primarily along land routes from the central zone, i.e., Asia and neighboring territories. The newer stratum, on the other hand, is represented by the languages of Europe, which from the beginning of the 16th century, were carried to the furthest ends of the earth, primarily by sea routes. Therefore, it is actually necessary to keep in mind two linguistic maps of the world— a 15th century map and a present-day map. Each of these two maps is elucidative on the basis of a somewhat different type of phenomena.
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