" A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language."
The family tree model is a representation of the historical relationships between languages, showing the 'branches' or 'descendants' of a common ancestral language.
Historical Linguistics: Historical linguistics is a sub-field of linguistics that deals with the study of language change over time.
Language Families: A language family is a group of related languages that share a common ancestor language.
Language Isolation: Language isolation refers to the situation in which a language has no known living relatives.
Comparative Linguistics: Comparative linguistics is the study of similarities and differences between languages.
Proto-Language: A proto-language is a hypothetical ancestor language from which all languages in a particular language family descended.
Sound Change: Sound change is the gradual transformation in the pronunciation of words over time.
Loanwords: A loanword is a word from one language that is adopted for use in another language.
Lexical Borrowing: Lexical borrowing is the process by which one language borrows vocabulary (words) from another language.
Cognates: Cognates are words in different languages that are related in meaning and have a common ancestor.
Etymology: Etymology is the study of the origin and history of words.
Language Contact: Language contact occurs when two or more languages are in contact with each other, resulting in linguistic borrowing and change.
Language Change: Language change is the process by which languages evolve over time.
Dialects: Dialects are regional or social variations in language that may differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar from standard language.
Pidgins and Creoles: Pidgins and creoles are contact languages that develop when groups of people who do not share a common language need to communicate.
Language Death: Language death occurs when a language is no longer spoken by any living speakers.
The binary tree model: Assumes that a language splits into two daughters at each branching point.
the multifurcating tree model: Allows for multiple daughter languages to emerge from a common ancestor at each branching point.
"Linguists therefore 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."
"The language families with the most speakers are the Indo-European family" and "the Sino-Tibetan family."
"A language family may contain any number of languages."
"Some languages, termed isolates, are not known to be related to any other languages and therefore constitute a family consisting of only one language."
"Genealogically related languages can be identified by their shared retentions."
"Shared retentions are systematic similarities that cannot be explained as due to chance or effects of language contact."
"Some sets of languages may in fact be derived from a common ancestor but have diverged enough from each other that their relationship is no longer detectable."
"Some languages have not been studied in enough detail to be classified, and therefore their family membership is unknown."
"According to Ethnologue, there are 7,151 living human languages."
"Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families."
"Membership of languages in a language family is established by research in comparative linguistics."
"They share systematic similarities that cannot be explained as due to chance or to effects of language contact."
"Different regional dialects of the proto-language spoken by different speech communities undergo different language changes and thus become distinct languages from each other."
"The Indo-European family includes many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali)."
"The term 'family' reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree."
"The Sino-Tibetan family has many speakers, mainly due to the many speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China."
"Some languages, termed isolates, are not known to be related to any other languages and therefore constitute a family consisting of only one language."
"The paragraph mentions the Indo-European family, the Sino-Tibetan family, the Austronesian family, the Niger-Congo family, and isolates."