Language family

A Linguistic communication family is the group of languages related through descent from the 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 style in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language mark as being genetically related.

According to Ethnologue there are 7,139 alive human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the number one language of at least one person. The language families with the almost speakers are: the Indo-European family, with numerous widely spoken languages native to Europe such as English and Spanish as living as South Asia such(a) as Hindi as well as Bengali; and the Sino-Tibetan family, mainly due to the numerous speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China.

There are also many dead languages, or languages which clear no native speakers living, and extinct languages, which hit no native speakers and no descendant languages. Finally, there are some languages that are insufficiently studied to be classified, and probably some which are not even so-called to cost outside their respective speech communities.

Membership of languages in a language family is setting by research in comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to descend "genetically" from a common ancestor. Speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with the original speech community gradually evolving into distinct linguistic units. Individuals belonging to other speech communities may also undertake languages from a different language family through the language shift process.

Genealogically related languages portrayed shared retentions; that is, assigns of the proto-language or reflexes of such attribute that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing convergence. Membership in a branch or office within a language family is establish by shared innovations; that is, common features of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the entire family. For example, Germanic languages are "Germanic" in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been submission in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the address of any Germanic languages.

Structure of a family

Language families can be dual-lane into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally transmitted to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a monophyletic unit; any its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are intended in the family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade.

Some taxonomists restrict the term family to alevel, but there is little consensus in how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, and groups into complexes. A top-level i.e., the largest family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch off of a proto-language is four branches down and there is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language.

The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is loosely considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods.

There is a remarkably similar sample shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically by ancestry as opposed to horizontally by spatial diffusion.

Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take the form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic, the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as a single language.

A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can supply wildly different numbers of languages within afamily. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language a language isolate with dialects to almost twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within a Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family.

Most of the world's languages are call to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed are called language isolates, essentially language families consisting of a single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque. In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some section in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them.

It is normally misunderstood that language isolates are classified as such because there is not sufficient data on or documentation of the language. This is false because a language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship is found with any other known language.

A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is normally clarified with a modifier. For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other contemporary language despite numerous attempts. Another well-known isolate is Mapudungun, the Mapuche language from the Araucanían language family in Chile. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically whether related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language, spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In the latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family.

A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language not to be confused with a mother tongue, which is one that a specific person has been exposed to from birth, being the root which all languages in the family stem from. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is for possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method, a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher. This canthe validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families. For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European is not attested by a thing that is said records and so is conjectured to have been spoken ago the invention of writing.