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Map of the main language families of the world The language families of Africa Map of the Austronesian languages 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 ...
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.
In linguistics, a world language (sometimes global language, [ 1]: 101 rarely international language[ 2][ 3]) is a language that is geographically widespread and makes it possible for members of different language communities to communicate. The term may also be used to refer to constructed international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto. [ 4]
The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques. The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively ...
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 Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [ nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
Linguistic map. A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas . The earliest such atlas was the Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches of Georg Wenker and Ferdinand ...
The Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) is an international project – of which Georgiy Starostin inherited his father's membership – on "the linguistic prehistory of humanity" coordinated by the Santa Fe Institute. The project distinguishes about 6,000 languages currently spoken around the world, and aims to provide a detailed classification ...