Language in use  
English Language & Linguistics

English Language

 

 

Language Families

In addition to Indo-European there are at least fourteen other language families which are the ancestors of modern language around the world.

 Eskimo-Aleut  Ural-Altaic
 Central American  Hamito-Semitic
South American  Dravidian
 Basque  Malayo-Polynesian
 Sudanese-Guinean  Sino-Tibetan
 Bantu  Japanese-Korean
 Khoin  Austro-Asian

Although there is no space here to explain the connections between non-Indo-European languages you could research one or more of these families. Use the David Crystal Encyclopedia of Language which has a detailed index, and use an Internet search engine to find out where the families originated and which languages they gave birth to.

This may lead you to consider one of the great unanswered questions of linguistics - did language emerge in one place and spread throughout the world, or did it develop in several different places simultaneously?

 

 
See also