Linguistics - Languages and Language Families

Refactored from Linguistics Notes Meta

• When languages evolve, they interact with other languages just like how species evolve, so the categorisation of languages based on their ancestry can be similar to zoology.
• As we go back in history, it becomes harder to retrace the development of languages so there might be multiple theories.
• It is believed by some that the European and Asian languages are rooted from some Indo-European family tree
• Because of these evolution process, languages can be similar or distant from each other in terms of their vocabulary, syntax, etc.
• Linguists compare historical languages to figure out their relationship
• Dialects and languages are usually in a continuum
• Interesting links
  • https://www.pinterest.com/pin/110690103324802742/
  • https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-world-of-languages/
  • https://toktopics.com/2017/04/15/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages/comment-page-1/

References