Language Families Part 1

Written by Blackkdark on 9th September 2007

Languages are grouped together by other languages which are similar to them.  In essence, the languages have similar properties in grammar, lexicon (vocabulary), and sometimes idioms.  When this happens, in most cases, they are part of something called a Language Family.  Usually a Language family has a common language from which they all decent or it's a conceptual idea of maybe several large groups with different dialects, and split from there.  Now some of the information is based on the earlier article about Accents and Dialects, so check it out here.

So what do we do with language families?  For one thing, when you understand how two or more languages are related, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to learn.  For example, if you know about some of the sound shifts occured in High German, it'd make it easier to find cognates like t>ss, Ger. Essen, Old Eng. Eten, modern Eng Eat.  It also helps us trace back how far a language goes, in studies of anthropology and linguistics.

So, let's look at some examples of languages, their families, and things older than that.  Let's start with a simple one, Romance families (No romance languages aren't more Romantic, it means Roman).  The modern Romance languages today come from a dialect of spoken Latin called Vulgar Latin.  Now in some cases like French, it mixed a bit with the Germanic language Frankish and developed French as we know it today.  Romanian has a heavily influence from the Slavic languages around it, that's one reason it kept the case system whereas it's fellow Romance langauges dropped it.  In other instances, there was other pronunciation shifts which formed that languages we know today.  Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, had various other influences before they made a standard spelling and still have heavy dialects.  Now Latin isn't the only one in it's own family, it came from a possible proto (original) language of Italic, which in turn came from Indo-European (also called Proto-Indo-European, I will write PIE for it).  However, Italic might not have been it's own language, but rather a bunch of languages that were spoken by the peoples who settled in Italy.

Now, PIE is a big language for Linguists who study historical and comparative linguistics of certain languages that range from Iceland to India.  There are several large families in PIE.  Some of them include, Hittite, Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Balto-Slavic,  amongst a few others.  The range is most of European, through the Middle East, Armenia, to Northern India, and as far as part of China, although the language spoken in the ladder case is extinct.  Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit are some of the oldest in it's family in which we have extensive records.  But today one can't even tell that some of these languages are Indo-European except in Grammar.  In the case of Farsi (also called Persian) the language is so riddled with Arabic words that it's grammar and basic vocabulary are the only indication of it being of PIE origin.

Now part of the concept is that PIE split into several different dialects which became languages.  So a group moved to China and spoke Tocharian, and another to Northern India and turned into Vedic-Sanskrit, another to Italy and developed Italic, etc etc.  Over time, they became seperate languages which had their own dialects which became languages themselves.  So in the Germanic area, the language of Proto-Germanic split into three groups (according to theory): North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic.  And later North Germanic formed into Old Norse, and Norwegian (and it's dialects), Danish and Swedish (and later Icelandic) came from Old Norse.
East Germanic had Prussian, Gothic and a few others, but today no forms of it survive in speech.  West Germanic became High German, Low German, English (eventually), Dutch, and a few others.