Languageshow language families branched

Real basis

• Language: About 7,000 languages exist today, and about 40% of them are disappearing.

• Proto-Indo-European: It may have originated on the East European steppe about 6,000 years ago; nearly half the world's people speak its descendant languages today.

• Proto-Germanic: Grimm's law describes how its consonants shifted systematically, for example Latin pater corresponds to English father.

• English: About 1.5 billion people speak English as a first or second language; about 60% of its vocabulary comes from Latin and French.

• German: Words can be strung together one after another into very long compounds.

• Old Norse: The language of the Vikings. Icelandic is still very close to it, and Icelanders can read sagas from 800 years ago.

• Latin: The language of the Roman Empire, which later split into the Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian.

• French: The Académie française, founded in 1635, still compiles the French dictionary.

• Spanish: About 500 million native speakers, second only to Chinese.

• Italian: Modern standard Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect Dante wrote in.

• Portuguese: Brazil has about 20 times as many Portuguese speakers as Portugal itself.

• Proto-Slavic: Began spreading rapidly about 1,500 years ago; the Slavic languages today are still mutually intelligible to a considerable degree.

• Russian: One of the two working languages of the International Space Station.

• Polish: Known for its dense consonant clusters.

• Indo-Iranian branch: The branch of the Indo-European family with the most speakers.

• Sanskrit: Around the 4th century BCE Pāṇini wrote nearly 4,000 grammar rules, one of the earliest formal grammars.

• Hindi: Spoken, it is almost identical to Urdu, but the two are written in the Devanagari and Arabic scripts respectively.

• Persian: It has changed little in a thousand years; Iranians today can still read the 11th-century Shahnameh.

• Greek: With over 3,400 years of written records, it is one of the living languages with the longest recorded history.

• Celtic languages: Once spread across Europe; today's Irish and Welsh are its descendants.

• Proto-Sino-Tibetan: Research suggests it originated about 6,000 years ago in the Yellow River basin of northern China.

• Old Chinese: The rhymes of the Classic of Poetry help scholars reconstruct how it was pronounced.

• Mandarin: Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect, is the language with the most native speakers.

• Cantonese: It keeps the entering tones of Middle Chinese, and Tang poems often rhyme better when read in Cantonese.

• Wu Chinese: It keeps the voiced initials of Middle Chinese; Shanghainese belongs to Wu.

• Min Chinese: The first branch to split from Old Chinese, it keeps many ancient pronunciations.

• Tibeto-Burman languages: About 400 languages, spoken in the Himalayas and Southeast Asia.

• Tibetan: In the 7th century the Tibetan script was created, modeled on Indian scripts.

• Burmese: The letters are mostly round, supposedly because they were first written on palm leaves, which straight lines would tear.

• Afroasiatic languages: Includes the Semitic languages, ancient Egyptian, Berber, Hausa and others.

• Ancient Egyptian: Its last form, Coptic, is still used in the liturgy of Egyptian Christians.

• Semitic languages: Roots usually consist of three consonants; inserting different vowels makes related words.

• Akkadian: The earliest known Semitic language, once the diplomatic lingua franca of the ancient Near East.

• Arabic: The word “algebra” comes from Arabic, and “algorithm” comes from the name of the mathematician al-Khwarizmi.

• Hebrew: Once used only for religion, it was revived as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th century, the only ancient language successfully revived.

• Niger–Congo family: By number of languages it is the largest family in the world, with over 1,500 languages.

• Bantu languages: About 4,000 years ago it spread east and south from around today's Cameroon, carrying farming and ironworking.

• Swahili: The lingua franca of East Africa, with many words borrowed from Arabic.

• Zulu: The clicks in it were borrowed from neighboring Khoisan languages.

• Yoruba: A tonal language: the same syllable with a different tone is a different word.

• Austronesian languages: Originating in Taiwan, it was carried by seafarers across half the globe, from Madagascar to Easter Island.

• Malay: Indonesian and Malaysian are both based on it, with over 200 million speakers.

• Tagalog: The basis of Filipino, which has absorbed many Spanish and English words.

• Polynesian languages: Polynesians navigated by double-hulled canoe and the stars, reaching Hawaii about 1,000 years ago and New Zealand about 750 years ago.

• Hawaiian: Only 13 letters, one of the languages with the fewest phonemes.

• Maori: One of the official languages of New Zealand, made official in 1987.

• Turkic languages: Spoken from the Mongolian plateau all the way to Turkey, with relatively small differences between them.

• Turkish: Switched from the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet in 1928.

• Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian belong to this family.

• Finnish: Nouns have 15 cases.

• Hungarian: Although it sits in Central Europe, it is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it.

• Dravidian languages: Spoken mainly in southern India, and possibly arrived in South Asia earlier than Indo-European.

• Tamil: It has an unbroken literary tradition of over 2,000 years.

• Japanese: Forms the Japonic family with the Ryukyuan languages; its relationship to other languages is still unsettled.

• Korean: Usually treated as a language isolate; its relationship to other languages is still disputed.

• Sumerian: One of the earliest known written languages, unrelated to any known language.

• Austroasiatic languages: Vietnamese and Khmer both belong to this family.

• Vietnamese: In the 17th century missionaries devised a Latin-letter spelling for it, which replaced Chinese characters as the official script in the 20th century.

• Khmer: The inscriptions of Angkor Wat were written in Old Khmer.

• Quechua: The lingua franca of the Inca Empire, still spoken by about 8 million people today.

• Nahuatl: The language of the Aztecs; the words tomato, chocolate and avocado all come from it.

• Esperanto: A constructed language created by Zamenhof in 1887, with grammar rules that have no exceptions.

• Programming languages: FORTRAN in 1957 was the first widely used high-level programming language; there are now thousands of programming languages.

Related research

These studies relate to this topic but are not direct proof of this page.

• The language gene: The FOXP2 gene linked to language underwent special changes in the human lineage.

  Source: Enard et al., Nature 2002, "Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language"

• Farmers and languages: The expansion of farming populations carried their languages to new places and shaped today's distribution of language families.

  Source: Diamond & Bellwood, Science 2003, "Farmers and their languages: the first expansions"