Language is one of the clearest culture traits, and its spread shows diffusion over thousands of years. Linguists group languages by ancestry, the way a family tree groups cousins.
Key idea
A language family is a group of languages descended from one ancestor language. The largest family by number of speakers is Indo-European (about 45 percent of the world's people speak one as a first language), then Sino-Tibetan. Other large families include Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian and Dravidian.
Why it works
Linguists find families by comparing words and grammar. Families share regular sound patterns in basic words such as numbers, body parts and family members, which are rarely borrowed. Those patterns show common descent. Languages that merely sit side by side borrow words but keep different grammar and basic vocabulary. A few languages, such as Basque in Spain and France, have no known relatives at all: they are called language isolates.
Worked examples
Worked example: Neighbors from different families
Hungary is surrounded by countries that speak Indo-European languages. Is Hungarian Indo-European?
- Being neighbors does not make languages related.
- Hungarian's basic words and grammar match Finnish and Estonian, not German or Slovak.
- So it belongs to the Uralic family.
Answer: No. Hungarian is Uralic.
Worked example: Matching languages to families
Which family does each belong to: Swahili, Arabic, Tagalog, Tamil?
- Swahili: Niger-Congo (a Bantu language).
- Arabic: Afro-Asiatic.
- Tagalog (the basis of Filipino): Austronesian.
- Tamil: Dravidian.
Answer: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian.
Common mistake
Students assume languages in the same country or region belong to the same family. Finnish and Hungarian are Uralic, not Indo-European like most of their neighbors; Basque is related to no other language; India has major Indo-European languages in the north and Dravidian languages in the south. Family is about ancestry, not location.
Where the first Indo-European speakers lived is debated. The two main ideas place them on the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas (the steppe hypothesis) or in Anatolia, spreading with farming (the Anatolian hypothesis). Many scholars now favor the steppe, but research continues.