language family
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A language family is a group of languages that all descended from the same ancestral language long ago, similar to how people in a family share common ancestors. Studying language families helps us understand human history, migration patterns, and how cultures have been connected over thousands of years.
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Map of the main language families of the world
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. Linguists thus describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time.