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EntityQ25295· pop 124· linked from 11,471 articles

language family

Also known as linguistic groups, language groups, linguistic family, language group, linguistic group, family of languages, language families, families of languages

group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor

AI overview

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.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Part of: macrofamily

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studied by: sociolinguistics
Commons category: Languages by family
has list: list of language families
different from: sprachbund
topic's main category: Category:Language families
topic has template: Template:Language families
on focus list of Wikimedia project: Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
exact match: ontology.londisizwe.org/mola#LanguageFamily
P8168: distribution

Sources (3)

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Encyclopedic overview

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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “language family” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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