Just ask Marvel – everyone loves an origin story!
Linguists theorize that all the languages in the world originated from a single, prehistoric protolanguage. As people migrated across the globe, their spoken language changed and split creating new languages or branches. Today, over seven thousand languages are spoken worldwide and organized into about 430 language families. Language families consist of related languages such as shared structure or words, use of tones or clicks, etc.
Larger language families can have hundreds of members:
- Indo-European has 176 languages including English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi.
- Sino-Tibetan has 146 languages including Mandarin and Cantonese.
- Afro-Asiatic has 145 languages including Arabic and Hebrew.
- Niger-Congo has 314 languages including Swahili.
Check out the incredible World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) to see language families mapped across the globe! And check out this cool drawing of Indo-European and Uralic language family trees.
Some languages are unique and have no language family members. They are called language isolates and there are about 104 globally. Surprisingly, language isolates tend to exist where there is great language diversity such as South America (46 isolates) and New Guinea (9 isolates).
Fun Fact: Language isolates are rarely located on islands, but the island of Tasmania has nine!
A well-known language isolate is the Basque language spoken in Northern Spain and Southern France. Basque, or Euskara, is the only surviving Paleo-European language spoken in Europe, predating the arrival of Indo-European language speakers.
Linguist Lyle Campbell thinks each language isolate is a “whole different window on the mind.” While their origins may remain a mystery, a language isolate is certainly a one-of-a-kind-window-on-the-mind. Yes, that rhymes!
Read More:
Language isolate | Ethnologue Free
Parker, Ethan. Vanishing Languages: Uncovering the Secrets of How We Think. The Science Herald. July 26, 2023. https://thescienceherald.com/humans/vanishing-languages-uncovering-the-secrets-of-how-we-think/
Urban, Matthias 2021. The geography and development of language isolates. R. Soc. Open Sci. 8202232. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202232