The languages of the world can be divided into a number of families of related languages, possibly grouped into larger stocks, plus a residue of isolates, languages that appear not to be genetically related to any other known languages, languages that form one-member families on their own. The number of families or stocks, languages, and isolates is hotly disputed. The disagreements centre around differences of opinion as to what constitutes a family or stock, as well as the acceptable criteria and methods for establishing them.
Linguists are sometimes divided into lumpers and splitters according to whether they lump many languages together into large stocks, or divide them into numerous smaller family groups. Merritt Ruhlen is an extreme lumper: in his classification of the world’s languages he identifies just nineteen language families or stocks, and five isolates. More towards the splitting end is Ethnologue, which identifies some ninety-four top-level families, as well as thirty-six isolates, and forty-three unclassified languages. About two hundred other exceptional languages are identified as well, including deaf sign languages. Even so, in terms of what has actually been established by application of the comparative method, the Ethnologue system is wildly lumping!
Some families, for instance Austronesian and Indo-European, are well established, and few serious doubts exist as to their genetic unity. Others are quite contentious. Both Ruhlen and Ethnologue identify an Australian family, although there is as yet no firm evidence that the languages of the continent are all genetically related. At least as contentious is Joseph Greenberg’s putative Amerind stock of Native American languages.
The Indo-European languages have been recognized as forming a family since at .least the late seventeenth century, when Andreas Jager observed in 1686 that Persian and many of the languages of Europe are descendants of a single language. Since Jager’s time, many more languages have been shown to belong to the family. Indeed, Indo-European languages are spoken throughout most of Europe, across Iran, through Central Asia, and into India. With the colonial expansions of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, they spread into the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Asia, in the process diversifying into numerous dialects. They have become major languages in many of the former colonies, and are spoken by a staggering two and a half billion speakers.
The family consists of just over 400 languages (430 according to the latest edition of Ethnologue), which can be grouped together into a number of subfamilies or branches.
More historical-comparative work has been done on Indo-European than any other language family, and many lexemes have been reconstructed for proto-Indo-European, as well as some of its grammar. Proto-Indo-European was an inflecting language, like ancient IndoEuropean languages such as Latin, Hittite and Ancient Greek, with a complex verbal system with different inflections for different persons and numbers of the subject, tense, aspect, mood, as well as case-marking for nouns.
Proto-Indo-European is widely believed to have been spoken in the southeast of Europe, perhaps in the region of Turkey, some six to eight thousand years ago. Opinions differ, however, and some argue for a more northerly location in the steppes of Russia. From the homelands the language spread east and west, in the process fragmenting into numerous mutually unintelligible languages.
It is now widely believed that the early period of Indo-European expansion that took the languages as far as India in the east and Ireland in the west, was not via military style invasions like the Roman conquests of 2,000-odd years ago. One influential idea is that the expansion of the languages accompanied the spread of agriculture from a centre in the near east, beginning some six to eight thousand years ago. According to one version of the story, farmers gradually spread outwards, using land previously occupied by hunters and gatherers, eventually ousting them. Another version has it that agriculture and the language of the agriculturalists spread by diffusion, without major population movements. This story is not without difficulties, and it seems that there are some problems with the timing of some events. An alternative view is that Indo-European spread instead with the domestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel.
The much smaller Uralic family consists of some thirty-eight languages, of which Finnish and Hungarian are the best known members. Uralic languages were probably once spoken over a large area in the northeast of Europe and the southwest of Asia, but were split up by intrusions of speakers of Indo-European and Altaic languages, leaving many of them geographically isolated. Hungarian is geographically separated from its relatives as a result of migrations beginning in about the sixth century AD, and continuing until about the eleventh century.
Altaic is an uncertain grouping of at least three relatively well established families, Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolic. According to some, Korean and Japanese also belong to this genetic group, although this is contested; more usually Korean and Japanese are taken to be language isolates, although according to Ethnologue, Japanese represents a small language family.
Also spoken in this large region are languages of the Caucasian families and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. Caucasian languages are spoken in the Caucasus region, along with Indo-European and Turkic languages. The Chukotko-Kamchatkan family is a small family of languages spoken on the two peninsulas with these names in far northeast Siberia. All of these languages are endangered, including the best known of them, Chukchi.
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