Language family


<p>A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common proto-language. As with human biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics. An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit; that is, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Many languages are known to belong to language families; for many others, however, family relationships are not known and only tentatively proposed.</p> <p>The concept of language families is based on the concept of historical ancestors for languages — normally the gradual evolution over time of one language into other languages, rather than the sudden creation of new languages. The concept of linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than the concept of biological ancestry, because there are cases of extreme historical language contact, due to conquest or trade. In the formation of creole languages and other types of mixed languages, it may be unclear which language should be considered the ancestor of a given language. However, these types of cases are relatively rare and most languages can be unambiguously classified into families.</p> <p>The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly, since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is 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 can demonstrate the 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 written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing.</p> <p>Sometimes, though, a proto-language can be identified with an historically known language. 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). Similarly, dialects of Old Norse are the proto-language of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic.</p>