Language Family

Have you ever noticed similarities between languages? For example, the German word for apple, apfel, is similar to the English term for the word. These two languages are similar because they belong to the same language family. Learning about the definition of language families and some examples can enhance one’s understanding of how languages are related.

Language Family: Definition

Just like siblings and cousins can trace their relationship back to one couple, languages almost always belong to a language family, a group of languages related through an ancestral language. The ancestral language that multiple languages connect back to is called a proto-language.

Identifying language families is useful for linguists because it can provide insight into the historical evolution of languages. They are also useful for translation because understanding linguistic connections can help identify similar meanings and forms of communication across languages and cultures. Examining so-called genetic classifications of languages and identifying similar rules and patterns is an element of a field called comparative linguistics.

Fig. 1 - Languages in a language family share a common ancestor.

Language Family: Meaning

When linguists study language families, they examine the relations between languages, and they also look at how languages branch off into other languages. For instance, language spreads through various types of diffusion, including the following:

• Relocation Diffusion: When languages spread because of people relocating to other places. For example, North America is full of Indo-European languages as a result of immigration and colonization.

• Hierarchical Diffusion: When a language spreads down a hierarchy from the most important places to the least important ones. For instance, many colonial powers taught their native language to people in colonies of the most importance.

As languages have spread throughout the years, they have changed into new ones, thereby adding new branches to existing language trees. There are multiple theories that explain how these processes work. For instance, the theory of language divergence posits that as people move away from one another (diverge), they use different dialects of the same language that become increasingly isolated until they become new languages. Sometimes, though, linguists observe that languages are created through the coming together (convergence) of previously isolated languages.

Language Family: Example

There are six major language families.

Afro-Asiatic

The Afro-Asiatic language family includes languages spoken in the Arabian Peninsula, Northern Africa, and Western Asia. It includes smaller branches of the family, such as:

• Cushitic (Ex: Somali, Beja)

• Omotic (Ex: Dokka, Majo, Galila)

• Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese, etc.)

Austronesian

The Austronesian language family includes most languages spoken on Pacific Islands. It includes smaller language families such as the following:

• Central-Eastern/Oceanic (Ex: Fijian, Tongan, Maori)

• Western (Ex: Indonesian, Malay, and Cebuano)

Fig. 2 - Language families have multiple branches.

Indo-European

Languages spoken in North America, South America, Europe, Western Asia, and Southern Asia belong to the Indo-European language family, which is the largest in the world. This was the first language family that linguists studied back in the 19th century. There are multiple smaller language families within the Indo-European one, including the following:

• Slavic (Ex: Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak, Czech, Croatian)

• Baltic (Ex: Latvian, Lithuanian)

• Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Latin)

• Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Danish)

Niger-Congo

The Niger-Congo language family includes languages spoken throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Almost six hundred million people speak languages in this language family. The language family includes smaller families like the following:

• Atlantic (Ex: Wolof, Themne)

• Benue-Congo (Ex: Swahili, Igbo, Zulu)

Sino-Tibetan

The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second-largest language family in the world. It also expands across a wide geographical area and includes North, South, and East Asia. This language family includes the following:

• Chinese (Ex: Mandarin, Fan, Pu Xian)

• Himalayish (Ex: Newari, Bodish, Lepcha)

Trans-New Guinea

The Trans-New Guinea language family includes the languages in New Guinea and the islands that surround it. There are approximately 400 languages in this one language family! Smaller branches include

• Angan (Akoye, Kawacha)

• Bosavi (Kasua, Kaluli)

• West (Wano, Bunak, Wolani)

The Largest Language Family

Consisting of roughly 1.7 billion people, the largest language family in the world is the Indo-European language family.

The main branches of the Indo-European language family are the following: ¹

Fig. 3 - The largest language family is the Indo-European language family.

• Armenian

• Baltic

• Slavic

• Indo-Iranian

• Celtic

• Italic

• Hellenic

• Albanian

• Germanic

English, a language that has become one of the dominant global languages, falls within this large language family.

The English Language Family

The English language family belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family and the Anglo-Frisian sub-branch below that. It connects back to an ancestor called Ugermanisch, which means Common Germanic, which was spoken around 1000 C.E. This common ancestor split into Eastern Germanic, Western Germanic, and Northern Germanic.

¹ William O’Grady, Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. 2009.