Tree of Languages

There are almost 7000 languages spoken in the world and all of them make our society diverse and beautiful. Sadly, some languages are much more widely spoken than others depending on the speaking population as only 23 of these languages are spoken by half of the world’s population. Now, Mandarin is the largest spoken language in the world because of its native speakers but if we take non-native speakers into consideration then English takes the lead as it is more spread out and spoken in almost 146 countries. Talking about the least spoken language in the world, there isn’t a specific one as around 2000 languages are on the brink of extinction. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, there are 18 languages with only one speaker.

Going into the history of languages, it is believed that almost all the languages are somehow connected with each other and their roots are generally found in Indo-European or Uralic languages. The tree of Uralic languages is limited to a smaller number of languages as compared to Indo-European languages which branch out to much larger numbers. Indo-European language is divided into main branches- European and Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan or Indic). Among Uralic languages, Finnish and Hungarian are the languages with the maximum demographic. In the case of Indo-European languages, several languages contribute to a large demographic such as English, Mandarin, Spanish, German, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, and French. 

The tree metaphor is usually used by Linguists to show the history of languages and define the relationship between them. But the tree used to lack imagination and creativity. But the tree of languages created by Minna Sundberg remapped the languages into a magnificent and beautiful tree. This tree adequately represents the relationship between groups of languages and shows that they descend from common ancestral proto-language. The leaves are used to show languages so the bigger the leaves , the larger speakers of that language. Scandinavian languages are neighbours to each other but this doesn’t mean that they belong to the same family as they have different roots.

There are different trees of languages used by different linguist groups. One other tree that divides the languages into three main families:

  • Indo- European 
  • Sino- Tibetan 
  • Afro-Asiatic

Indo-European is the largest family followed by Sino- Tibetan and then by Afro-Asiatic. Some interesting observations about these families:

  • The Indo-European family included English, Hindi and Russian.
  • The Sino-Tibetan branch includes Mandarin and Thai.
  • Japanese and Korean have their own branches.
  • Tamil language is of a different branch called Dravidian.
  • The Austronesian branch includes Indonesian, Malay,and Tagalog.

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