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Language family. A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
This is a list of ancestor languages of modern and ancient languages, detailed for each modern language or its phylogenetic ancestor disappeared. For each language ...
Map of major Dravidian languages. Distribution of the Indo-European language family branches across Eurasia. Area of the Papuan languages. Map of the Australian languages. Distribution of language families and isolates north of Mexico at first contact. The major South American language families. Ethnolinguistic groups of mainland Southeast Asia.
Tree model. Cladistic representation of the Mayan linguistic family, going back 4000 years. (The numbers represent proposed historical dates in the Common Era ). In historical linguistics, the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly ...
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family— English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several ...
Balto-Slavic language tree. [citation needed] Linguistic maps of Slavic languagesSince the interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are ...
The Dravidian peoples are an ethnolinguistic supraethnicity composed of many distinct ethnolinguistic groups native to South Asia (predominantly India ). They speak the Dravidian languages, which have a combined total of about 250 million native speakers. [ 1] Dravidians form the majority of the population of South India and Northern Sri Lanka.