Language Classification Research Paper

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The classification of languages, both those in use and those no longer spoken (but existing in the written record), depends on principles of linguistics that study languages in terms of their structure, their geographic distribution in the world, and their genetic relationship in language families.

The classification of human languages is a scientific activity that aims at grouping the approximately six thousand living languages of humanity (and the several hundred known languages that are no longer spoken but that left written records, some of them up to five thousand years old) into historically meaningful subsets. Throughout the history of linguistics—the scientific study of language—various principles have been used to arrive at such subsets, the three most important of which are the principles of typology, the principle of linguistic areas, and the principle of genetic relationship.

Linguistic Typology

Linguistic typology studies the possible and actual variation of human languages in terms of their structure. Thus, languages may differ in terms of the number and type of sounds (phonemes) they use. Some, for example, may have a very high number of consonants, as is true for most languages of the Caucasus region; others may have very few of them, as is the case in many Polynesian languages. The structure of words may differ widely; some languages use few if any form changes to alter the meaning of words (morphology), as is the case in Vietnamese and many other languages of Southeast Asia, while other languages (many Native American languages, for example) have highly complex morphological systems. Almost any structural feature of languages may be and is used by typologists to compare languages and to group them into sets of languages that behave in a similar way.

The study of the typological variation of human languages reached a first peak in the early nineteenth century. The assumption that structural/typological similarity/uniformity of languages is also indicative of common descent (“relationship”) was gradually abandoned, however, when it became clear that languages may lose or acquire many structural features (previously thought to be quite invariant in the course of time). Thus, for example, a language may develop a systematic contrast of tone height to distinguish meanings (it may become a “tone language,” like Chinese), or, on the other hand, it may lose this feature (as, in fact, any other linguistic feature describable in typological terms). While language typology, after a certain period of comparative neglect, developed again (since the 1960s, driven by the seminal works of J. H. Greenberg), into one of the major and most successful subdisciplines of linguistics, it is no longer regarded as a primary tool for the detection of the (possible) common origin of languages.

Areal Linguistics

Areal linguistics studies languages from the viewpoint of their geographical (areal) distribution on the planet. While phenomena like this have of course been well known to students of language for centuries, areal linguistics as the systematic study of language interaction gained considerable momentum with the work of K. Sandfeld in the 1930s, which drew particular attention to the striking similarities of many languages of the Balkans, which could only be explained as due to prolonged intensive contact between speakers of these languages (Greek, Serbo-Croat, Albanian, Rumanian) over many centuries. Rather than merely, and trivially, stating their locations, areal linguistics aims at elucidating the way languages spoken in adjacent regions influence each other. It is well known that words often travel from language to language (in English these loanwords include beef from French, gestalt from German, habitat from Latin, taboo from Polynesian, and tipi from Siouan), but languages also influence each other in terms of their structure as well. If the contact between two or more languages in a given area extends over a considerable period of time—generations or even centuries—it is often observed that structural traits of these languages converge, often to a considerable degree. In some cases a (politically or culturally) dominant language “attracts” other languages in its geographical scope, whereas in other cases languages in a given area (which may be continent sized) show a large degree of common structural traits that are best explained by areal convergence, but without a single discernable dominant language that can be held responsible for this picture. Well-studied areas of structural convergence of languages (for which the German term Sprachbund, literally “league of languages,” is widely used) are the Balkans, the Indian subcontinent, the American Northwest, the Caucasus, and New Guinea, but more generally such phenomena are observable across the planet.

In some cases, the study of the areal interaction of languages may, if used with due caution, reveal information about historical processes that took place sometimes even before the communities in question came into the scope of written history. The role of Scandinavian and, later, Norman French people in the history of England is well known and documented, and these periods of historical contacts left their footprint in the English language, but in certain cases language alone points scholars to contacts that may have taken place in early history. For example, certain traits of the Russian language betray the fact that large areas of what is now central European Russia were once populated by tribes speaking languages akin to Finnish before the expansion of East Slavic/ Russian to the east of Moscow (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries CE). Later those tribes were assimilated or driven out of those territories to survive only at their fringes. Another example worth mentioning is the presence in Zulu (and certain other languages of the Bantu language family in southern Africa) of “click” sounds that are characteristic of one or more early variant(s) of the so-called Bushman (Khoisan) languages, which today are spoken quite far away from Zulu territory, but which must have been present there in times well before our historical records for this region begin.

Genetic Linguistics

The third method of grouping the welter of human languages into meaningful subsets is that of genetic or historical comparative linguistics, which attempts to identify language families (groups of languages) that share a common ancestor language, which is usually no longer spoken and more often than not is not even attested in any written record. While areal and typological linguistics are sometimes able to lead researchers to insights into the general history of some regions of the world, genetic linguistics makes historical information a primary concern. People have been grouping “similar” languages into “families” for centuries, thus, for example, the basic unity of the Romance languages (as descendants of Latin) or that of the Semitic languages have been commonplace since the Middle Ages. No traveling speaker of Russian could ever fail to notice that, for instance, Polish is more “similar” to Russian than it is to German and, therefore, a prescientific notion of Slavic as a family could emerge long before the advent of linguistic methods. We may call such families, the unity of which is usually discernable for the untrained observer, or, in other words, evident on mere inspection, “trivial” language families. It was not before the turn of the end of the eighteenth century CE that language scholarship developed methods which allowed the detection of “deeper,” “non-trivial” relationships between languages.

In many well-known cases, the genetic classification of languages alone was able to inform scholarship of sometimes large-scale prehistoric movements of people, which would have gone unrecognized otherwise. Some cases were quite surprising: the detection of the Indo-European family of languages at the end of the eighteenth century revealed the at the time unexpected fact that most languages of Europe (indeed, all but Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and a few others related to them—the Uralic languages—and Basque, which does not fit in any language family) are demonstrably related to many languages of Asia, including Armenian, the Iranian languages, and Sanskrit and its relatives).

Genetic relationship of languages implies that the ancestors of the peoples using the languages in historical times must share a greater deal of their early history than other sources are able to tell us; in other words, these languages must be the continuations of a once existent “proto-language,” or, to quote William Jones, who, after having studied Sanskrit in India for several years while serving as a judge in Fort Williams (now Calcutta), inaugurated a whole new academic field with his famous words:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” (William Jones, as quoted in Cannon 1991)

The fact that all these languages are indeed descendants of a lost language—most commonly called a proto-language, in this case Proto-Indo-European—is nowhere disputed today, but there is still no consensus on when and where this original language was spoken, or by whom. Most scholars today agree that the time of the dispersal, and finally disintegration, of this hypothetical group of Proto-Indo-European speakers must have been in the late Neolithic (i.e., very tentatively between 8000 and 4000 BCE); on the original location opinions still abound, but southern Russia and the Ukraine, Anatolia, or the Ponto- Caspian steppe region are most often mentioned as possible candidates.

Another surprising result of the methodological study of language relationship was the discovery that Malagasy, the dominant language of Madagascar is, though geographically located in Africa, most closely related to languages as far afield as Indonesia, more precisely of the island of Borneo (Kalimantan), which implies a prehistoric maritime expansion of the ancestors of the Malagasy people over a considerable distance.

A further example is the discovery that the languages of the North American Apache tribes (located mainly in the southwestern United States) are most closely related to languages of the Athabaskan group, whose speakers live mainly in sub-Arctic and Arctic Canada and Alaska, showing that these culturally very divergent groups of Native Americans belong together historically.

It should be mentioned, however, that historical linguistics is not always that successful. The peopling of the Americas by migration across the Bering Strait is a well-established fact of prehistory, arrived at mainly by the application of archaeological methods; it should thus be expected, therefore, that at least some Native American languages would turn out to be genetically related to at least some languages of the Old World (such as Siberian languages). Although linguists and laypeople alike often proposed the idea of “Cross-Bering families,” a methodologically acceptable demonstration of such a connection is still lacking (with the possible exception of the Eskimo- Aleut family being relatable to some Siberian groups, among them maybe Uralic).

Language Isolates

Some languages have defied all attempts at classification and remain for the linguistic sciences what are usually called language isolates. Some of the better-known examples are Basque in the Pyrenees, Burushaski in the Karakorum Mountains, ancient Etruscanin Tuscany, Ainu in Japan, and the first language to be put into writing—Sumerian—in what is now southern Iraq. Two major languages of East Asia, Japanese and Korean, are often said to be part of the so-called Altaic language family (which also comprises the Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungusic languages), but many scholars now question the validity of Altaic as a genetic grouping, though some experts continue to view Japanese and Korean as being related at least to each other, and thus these important languages may have to join the roster of language isolates.

Accepted Language Families

Well-established and uncontroversial language families include Semitic (comprising Arabic and Hebrew, among others) and the larger Afroasiatic family (comprising Semitic, Ancient Egyptian, and other language groups of northern Africa), Dravidian (Tamil and other languages of southern India), Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and other languages of the Himalayas and Southeast Asia), Austronesian (Malay, Tagalog, Malagasy, and languages of Oceania), Austroasiatic (Cambodian, Vietnamese and other languages of South and Southeast Asia). In Africa, the large Niger-Congo family is mostly accepted today (with the vast subgroup of the Bantu languages); important language families of the New World are Eskimo-Aleut, Algonkin, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, Maya, Carib, and Ge, among others. Some specialists combine all aboriginal languages of Australia into one family, “Australian”; others define one big family on that continent, the Pama-Nyungan family, together with a number of others, which are mainly situated in the north and northwest of the continent. Of all major areas, the ethnically and linguistically stunningly diverse island of New Guinea is home to a disproportionately big number of language families, few of which have lent themselves so far to successful attempts of reducing this number. All continents are furthermore home to a number of further, smaller-scale, language families, which cannot fully be enumerated here.

Detecting Language Families

The methods of detecting a valid language family, or of combining established families into larger groupings, which are sometimes called phyla, are complicated and sometimes the object of ongoing scholarly debates. All agree, however, that some language families are so transparent that no special case has to be made for the common origin of their members. The Romance languages, for example, have the rare distinction that their proto-language—Latin—is actually attested. Other examples are Slavic, Germanic, Indic, Turkic, and Semitic. These easily identifiable families usually split up into single languages (subfamilies, branches, sub-branches) relatively recently.

For other families, the existence of which is not always obvious for the untrained observer, an intricate apparatus of methods has to be applied to demonstrate a relationship. A mere structural, or typological, resemblance of languages is now generally rejected as indicative of a valid language family, since it is well known and demonstrated that the typological makeup of languages may change, sometimes quite drastically, over the course of time. Nor may a linguistic classification be based on anthropological or so-called racial criteria, since established language families are known that transcend such boundaries (the Afroasiatic family, for example). Similarities of a general kind—most often observed in the lexicon of languages—may sometimes be no more than the result of mere chance; in other cases they may be the result of areal convergence of the languages in question.

It is generally agreed that a convincing demonstration of the genetic relationship of two or more languages (or families) requires a high degree of regularity of correspondences. In other words, even a large number of similar words may not suffice to demonstrate a relationship if it cannot be shown that the actual sounds (phonemes) making up the words and the affixes (morphemes) of the languages compared correspond to each other in a regular and predictable way. A further requirement that specialists often demand is that the morphological systems of languages within a family be demonstrably matchable onto one another, and furthermore, that the degree of regularity found in the lexicon be strictly observed in the domain of morphology as well.

Other scholars have at times advocated less strict principles for the demonstration of genetic relationship, but their proposals remain highly controversial and continue to spawn heated discussions even today. The field of language classification is also one in which an unusually high number of amateur researchers continue to develop and publish often very idiosyncratic ideas, which sometimes receive the attention of the general public. It goes without saying that the language isolates mentioned above attract much attention from well-meaning amateur linguists, whose hypotheses—often brought forward with considerable ardor and not rarely used to support some political or nationalistic agenda—may frequently gain wide exposure in the popular press. Meanwhile, the scientific process of the classification of the languages of humankind is still ongoing, and important, even surprising, results may still be expected from it, even if certain issues are still the focus of sometimes-heated debates. One such controversy surrounds the attempts that have been made—and continue to be made—to reduce the number of identified language families to a considerably smaller number, maybe even to one, showing that all languages share one very remote common ancestor.

The Unique Challenge of Language Classification

The work of language classification owes much of its terminology and some of its more general principles and models to the classification of living species in biology. While there are indeed a lot of analogies between the two disciplines, the nature of their respective objects is profoundly different: one of the more important differences between biological and linguistic classification is the fact that while in biology the fundamental unity of the realm of living beings—that is, their ultimate relatedness—is not in doubt, and classification in biology is more a matter of establishing closer relationships between species, in linguistics no such underlying unity is generally agreed upon. Unlike the biologist, the linguistic taxonomist still faces the task of establishing relationships as such in the first place—the alternative being isolated, nonrelatable status for some languages— with some languages and smaller groupings still unclassified and the strong possibility that this state of affairs may remain without remedy.

Bibliography:

Baldi, P. (Ed.). (1990). Linguistic change and reconstruction methodology (Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs 45). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Campbell, L. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Cannon, G. (1991). Jones’s “Sprung from Some Common Source”: 1786–1986. In S. M. Lamb & E. D. Mitchell (Eds.), Sprung from some common source. Investigations into the prehistory of languages (pp. 23–47). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Michalove, P., Georg, S., & Ramer, A. M. (1998). Current issues in linguistic taxonomy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27, 451–472.
Sandfeld, K. (1930). Linguistique balkanique: problemes et resultats [Balkan linguistics: Problems and results]. Paris: Klincksieck.
Trask, R. L. (2000). The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press.

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