Most languages are known to belong to language families ("families" hereforth). An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit, i.e., all its members derive from a common ancestor. The ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since most languages have a very short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many of the features of the common ancestor of related languages by applying the comparative method -- a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th-centurylinguistAugust Schleicher. It can demonstrate the family status of many of the groupings listed below.
Language families can be subdivided into smaller units, conventionally referred to as "branches" (because the history of a language family is often represented as a "tree" diagram).
The common ancestor of a family (or branch) is known as its "protolanguage". For example, the reconstructible protolanguage of the well-known Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European (not known from written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing). Sometimes a protolanguage can be identified with a historically known language. Thus, provincial dialects of Latin ("Vulgar Latin") gave rise to the modern Romance languages, so the Proto-Romance language is more or less identical with Latin (if not exactly with the literary Latin of the Classical writers), and dialects of Old Norse are the protolanguage to Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic.
Languages that cannot be reliably classified into any family are known as language isolates.
According to the Ethnologue (a comprehensive listing of the world's languages), the largest language families are:
Major language families (grouped geographically without regard to inter-family relationship)
In the following, each "bulleted" item is a known language family. The geographic headings over them are meant solely as a tool for grouping families into collections more comprehensible than an unstructured list of the dozen or two of independent families. Geographic relationship is convenient for that purpose, but these headings are not a suggestion of any "super-families" phylogenetically relating the families named.
The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 26 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern and central India, as well as in parts of Afghanistan and Iran.
The existence of the Dravidian languagefamily was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor.
A grammar of the Teloogoo language, commonly termed the Gentoo, peculiar to the Hindoos inhabiting the northeastern provinces of the Indian peninsula / by A.D. Campbell.
In northern Asia there are a number of languages that appear either to form small, independent families or to be language isolates, such as the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languagefamily of the Chukchi and Kamchatka peninsulas in the far east of Russia.
The family stretches from the eastern edge of Siberia to the Aleutian Islands, and across Alaska and northern Canada to Greenland, where one variety of the Inuit language, Greenlandic, is an official language.
Languages of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families constitute the major indigenous languages of northeastern North America, while the Siouan family is one of the main families of central North America.
Feeds |
Contact