Sure languages are related to each other. But as a person'due south family consists of people who share common ancestry, related languages too come from shared lineages. A language family unit is a group of different languages that all descend from a particular common language. The one language that generated those other languages in its family is known as a protolanguage.

Some languages practice not come up from a protolanguage. These are known as language isolates, and include languages, such as Basque, spoken by some in southwestern Europe, and Pirahã, spoken by the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Withal, most languages spoken throughout the world belong to a language family.

For example, languages, such as Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, and French, all belong to the language family known every bit "romance languages." The romance languages evolved from Latin, the linguistic communication used in aboriginal Rome. The Latin give-and-take Romanicus, meaning "Roman," was after shortened to "Romance," which is where the linguistic communication family name came from. Latin itself, however, evolved from the Indo-European language, an aboriginal protolanguage, which is the origin of most of the languages spoken in modern Europe and parts of Asia.

Other branches of the Indo-European language family unit have evolved into completely dissimilar groups. One example is the Germanic languages. Linguists generally describe Germanic languages in three groups: West Germanic, North Germanic, and Eastward Germanic. The West Germanic group includes German, English language, and Dutch. North Germanic includes Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. East Germanic includes Gothic and the languages once spoken by members of peoples like the Vandals and the Burgundians. While the languages in the West Germanic and North Germanic groups are withal spoken, those of the Eastward Germanic group are now extinct.

Some other important language family is the Sino-Tibetan family unit. It is the globe'southward 2d largest linguistic communication family, with more than 1 billion speakers of its hundreds of unlike languages. It includes both the Sinetic languages (known equally the Chinese dialects) and the Tibeto-Burman languages (such as Tibetan and Burmese). Mandarin Chinese is the well-nigh widely spoken language in this family. Like many Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin Chinese is tonal. In tonal languages (which too include Thai and Hmong), the song pitch the speaker uses when saying a word helps determine its meaning.

Although the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families 2 of the largest in the world, linguists have categorized more one hundred language families around the globe. Equally linguists continue to study language and its origins, our understanding of linguistic communication families volition continue to evolve.

Family of Language

When languages are related, they consist of a linguistic communication family. Spanish, Italian, Romanaian, Portuguese, and French belong to a language family unit known as the "romance languages."

evolve

Verb

to develop new characteristics based on adaptation and natural selection.

language family unit

Noun

group of languages descended from a common ancestral language.

lineage

Substantive

line of descendants of a particular antecedent.

linguist

Noun

person who studies language.

origin

Noun

source or beginnings.

protolanguage

Noun

language from which a family of languages has evolved .

Romance languages

Noun

spoken and written forms of communication that share a root in the Latin linguistic communication: Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, and Romanaian.

tribe

Noun

community made of one or several family groups sharing a common culture.

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    Last Updated

    Aug. xx, 2020

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