Why is English related to other
languages?
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A LANGUAGE FAMILY is a collection of languages
related through a common ancestral language
that existed long before recorded history.
Indo-European is the world’s most extensively
spoken language family (nearly 3 billion people)
Within a language family, a LANGUAGE BRANCH
(or sub-family) is a collection of languages
related through a common ancestral language
that existed several thousand years ago.
A LANGUAGE GROUP is a collection of languages
within a branch that share a common origin in
the relatively recent past and display relatively
few differences in grammar and vocabulary.
Germanic Branch
West-Germanic is the group within the
Germanic branch that English belongs to.
 West-Germanic is further divided into subgroups: High Germanic (basis for modern
German) and Low Germanic (English,
Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian)
 North Germanic—4 Scandinavian
languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish
and Icelandic
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Indo-Iranian Branch of IndoEuropean
Includes more than 100 individual
languages spoken by 1 billion people.
 Branch can be divided into two groups,
eastern (Indic) and western (Iranian).
 Indic languages include Hindi (1/3 India)—
spoken many different ways but written in
Devangari
 Urdu (Pakistan) is spoken like Hindi but
written in the Arabic alphabet
 Iranian—Farsi, Pashto (Afghanistan), and
Kurdish—Arabic alphabet
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Balto-Slavic Branch
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Slavic was once a single language with the hearth in Asia.
Several groups migrated to different areas of Eastern
Europe—divided into East, West, and South Slavic groups
and also Baltic.
East—mostly Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian
West—Polish, Czech, Slovak
South Slavic—spoken in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia,
Montenegro, and Serbia
Bosnia and Croatians use the roman alphabet and
Montenegrins and Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet
When the countries belonged to Yugoslavia, language was
called Serbo-Croatian—recalls dominance of Croatians and
Bosnians by Serbs—now Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian.
Romance Branch
What are the 5 most common romance
languages? SPANISH, PORTUGUESE,
FRENCH, ITALIAN, AND ROMANIAN
 What is the root? Latin vs. Vulgar Latin
 Mountain ranges—intervening obstacles
 Romansh (SW) Catalan (Andorra &
Catalonia), Sardinian,
 Ladin, Friullian (Italy), and Romansh are
official dialects of Rhaeto-Romanic
 Ladino—mixture of Spanish, Greek,
Turkish and Hebrew—spoken in Israel
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Romance Language Dialects
 France—North
and South
– Originally Francien (hearth Ile de
France) official in 16th century
– Langue d’oil / langue d’oc
– Hoc illud est (that is so)-> Hoc-> oc O-il
– Languedoc, (Occitan, Auvergnat,
Gascon, Provencal)
Spain/Portugal
Kingdom of Castile merged with Leon and
Aragon--Castilian Spanish
 Now called Spanish but Castilian in Latin
America
 Spanish and Portuguese achieved global
importance because of imperialism.
 Spanish Academy—published official
dictionary in 1992
 1994 Portugal, Brazil and several African
countries standardized Portuguese.
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Dialects vs. Separate languages
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is difficult to decide what is a
dialect and what is a separate
language
 Creole or creolized language
 Mutual intelligibility?
Mutual Intelligibility
Means two people can understand each other
when speaking.
Problems:
Cannot measure mutual intelligibility
Many “languages” fail the test of mutual
intelligibility
Standard languages and governments
impact what is a “language” and what is
a “dialect”
Origin and Diffusion of IndoEuropean
 Germanic,
Romance, Balto-Slavic,
and Indo-Iranian are all part of the
same Indo-European family.
 Linguists believe the languages to
have descended from one common
ancestral language—proto-European.
How do Linguists Study
Historical Languages?
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Backward reconstruction – tracking sound
shifts and the hardening of consonants
backward to reveal an “original” language.
– Can deduce the vocabulary of an extinct
language.
– Can recreate ancient languages (deep
reconstruction)
– Can use common roots for various words to
deduce what type of location the “original”
language came from.
FOR EXAMPLE…
Looking at the physical attributes of the
words themselves, one finds common
roots in all Indo-European languages with
words such as winter, snow, bee, oak,
beech, bear, dear, and pheasant.
 Words such as ocean, elephant, camel and
rice cannot be traced back to a common
Proto-Indo-European ancestor.
 What does that say?
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Historical Linkages among Languages
Indo-European
language family
 Proto-Indo-European
language
 Nostratic Language
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Linguists and Anthropologists
 Agree
on the existence of a language
 Disagree on when and where and on
the processes and routes
 One theory argues war and conquest
 Another peaceful food sharing
Kurgan Theory
Marija Gimbutas
 Steppes near the border of modern day
Russia and Kazakhstan
 Earliest evidence dates back to 4300BC
 Nomadic herders migrating through
Western Europe, eastward to Siberia and
southeastward to Iran and South Asia
 Used horses and conquered much of
Europe and South Asia between 3500 and
2500 BC
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Anatolian Hearth Theory
 Colin
Renfrew
 First speakers lived 2,000 years
before the Kurgans, in Eastern
Anatolia (present day Turkey)
 Argues that speakers grew their own
food and so were peaceful and just
grew in population