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"When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, a story set in a lushly imagined post-apocalyptic Nordic world, has drawn the antidote to the boring linguistic tree diagram."
Language is a cultural tie that shows human drift in much the same way we see genetic drift. Languages change over time, and as culture changes, language is slow to catch up. (hence, the lack of a native word for non native foods or technology. e.g. Coca-Cola)
I love the English language!
Unit 3 Cultural Patterns and Processes (Language)
The image shows how many languages are related and have many common ancestors. Languages are grouped into language families and are even more broadly categorized.
Language is a huge part of culture and it is the way that people communicate amongst each other. There are hundreds of languages in our world, but as globalization and pop culture diffuse many languages are being lost and no longer spoken. A good example of a dead language would be Latin. Many of our common day languages trace their roots back to Latin, but no one speaks Latin anymore.