Language Families. The Indo-European Language Family

A language family is a group of related languages that share similar words, sentence and grammatical constructions, and other attributes. Attributes common to languages within the same family suggest that they shared a common ancestor at some point in the past. Subsequent movement of people speaking this common ancestral language led eventually to its division into mutually unintelligible descendants.

The concept of a language family was originally developed by Sir William Jones (1746-1794), an English judge serving in British India in the eighteenth century. In order to read the important literary and religious texts of ancient India, Jones taught himself Sanskrit. In doing so. he found that the vocabulary and grammatical construction of Sanskrit was surprisingly reminiscent of Greek and Latin. Jones wrote that "no philologer could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source."

Because languages within the same family share certain attributes, it is relatively easy for someone to learn a language if he or she is fluent in another language in the same family.

A Tree of Language Families. This family tree of language ancestry and relationships is the result of geographic and linguistic studies

Most English speakers have an easier time learning German. French, or Spanish, which are in the same family as English, than Arabic or Japanese, which are in different families.

There are about fifteen major language families distributed throughout the world today. The distribution of language families reflects historical migration trends and political conquests. The Indo-European language family, to which English belongs, was originally confined to Europe. Southwest Asia, and India. The worldwide diffusion of European civilization to other parts of the world during the Age of Exploration resulted in the spread of Indo-European languages to the Americas.

Australia, and elsewhere. Similarly, the Ural-Altaic family of languages originated in Asia and includes many languages spoken in Siberia and eastern Russia. Three contemporary European languages—Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian—belong to this family. That these European languages are of Asiatic origin is the result of the westward movement of Mongols and other Asians during the Middle Ages.

Both relocation diffusion and expansion diffusion are important to the diffusion of language. European settlers in the Americas brought their Indo-European languages across the Atlantic Ocean with them. As Europeans conquered Native American societies in the Americas, they taught their languages to their captives, thus expanding the number of Indo-European speakers.

The Indo-European Language Family.The largest language family in the modern world is theIndo-European family, which includes most of the languages of Europe. Southwestern Asia, and India. About1.6 billion people speak an Indo-European language athome, and nearly half of the world's population speaks atleast one Indo-European language. Indeed, eight of thetwelve major languages—English, French, Spanish,Portuguese. German, Russian, Hindi and Bengali—areIndo-European.

Like other language families, the Indo-European family is marked by substantial similarities among the languages within it.

The Indo-European languages are grouped into several branches, as shown in. English is one of several languages that make up the Germanic branch. Other languages in this branch include German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages.

The Indo-European Language Family. English is an Indo-European language, and Indo-European languages are spoken by over half the world's population. English is most closely related to the Germanic languages, less so to the Romance languages, and more distantly to the other branches in the Indo-European family.

The Romance languages are derived from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Modern Romance languages include French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Each of these languages is spoken in areas of Europe that ware part of the Roman Empire for long periods of time.

In addition to the Germanic and Romance languages the Indo-European family includes several additional branches. The Slavic languages are important throughout eastern Europe. Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak. Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian are among the more important Slavic languages. Many of the Slavic languages are written in an alphabet distinct from the Latin alphabet common to the Germanic and Romance languages. The Cyrillic alphabet in which many Slavic languages are written is derived from the ancient Greek alphabet.

The Indo-Iranian languages are spoken throughout much of India and Southwest Asia. Many of India's official languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, and Gujarati, belong to this branch of the Indo-European family. Persian, which is spoken in Iran, and Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan, also belong to the

Indo-Iranian group. Urdu is similar to Hindi, but it is written with a different script. Other Indo-European branches include the Celtic languages, the Baltic languages, Greek, Albanian, and Armenian. As we will discuss in detail later in the chapter, the Celtic languages still are spoken in corners of the British Isles and in northwestern France. The Baltic languages are spoken in the former Soviet republics of Latvia and Lithuania. The three remaining branches are largely confined to Greece, Albania, and Armenia, respectively.