Click image, then click again, to enlarge
Call it counterintuitive clickbait if you must, but Forbes’ Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry made an intriguing argument when he granted the title of “Language of the Future” to French, of all tongues. “French isn’t mostly spoken by French people and hasn’t been for a long time now,” he admits,” but “the language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050. One study “even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin.”
I don’t know about you, but I can never believe in any wave of the future without a traceable past. But the French language has one, of course, and a long and storied one at that. You see it visualized in the information graphic above (also available in suitable-for-framing prints!) created by Minna Sundberg, author of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent.
“When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor,” writes Mental Floss’ Arika Okrent. “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).”
Sundberg takes this tree metaphor to a delightfully lavish extreme, tracing, say, how Indo-European linguistic roots sprouted a variety of modern-day living languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Italian — and, of course, our Language of the Future. The size of the branches and bunches of leaves represent the number of speakers of each language at different times: the likes of English and Spanish have sprouted into mighty vegetative clusters, while others, like, Swedish, Dutch, and Punjabi, assert a more local dominance over their own, separately grown regional branches. Will French’s now-modest leaves one day cast a shadow over the whole tree? Perhaps — but I’m not canceling my plans to attend Spanish practice group tonight.
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via Mental Floss
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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
As a Turk I’m amazed that Turkic languages, spoken as a native language by some 170 million people is not in your tree. The total number of Turkic speakers, including second-language speakers.
Any explanation for this omission?
Yes, and also the Arabic Language, spoken as a native language by 290 million people (2010)…
Modern Standard Arabic is an official language of 27 states, the third most after English and French.
I assume, because the tree represents the Indo-European languages (and the Uralic languages, I guess because of their spread in northern Europe).
The Turkic languages are not part of these, but of the Altaic languages. Also not shown are the Sino-Tibetan languages with more than a billion speakers, the Hamito-Semitic languages with around 500 million speakers and other language families.
Georgian language missing! It has its own alphabet and history longer than most langeages on the image:(
The Basque language is missing, too. A unique language with almost no communalities with any other language.
Why are the African languages missing from this article and infographic?
I’ll just copy one of my earlier comments from facebook.
“First of all, this inforgraphic is a part of an ongoing web-comic series called “SSSS” (“Stand Still. Stay Silent — webcomic”) which is about a post-apocalyptic future where only Nordic countries (Scandinavia + Iceland + Finland) remains on earth. So it is makes sense that the artist only mentioned the roots of theese countries’ languages in her artwork.”
Noıw go figure it out:
http://www.sssscomic.com/
Francois you know why. The authors of this infographic and this article do not believe that Africans are humans or that they’re subhuman and therefore their languages don’t count. Gotta love white supremacy! It’s so…consistent.
The problem lies in the writer of this article who misnamed their article. The title of the infographic is very clear, while the writer, for some reason, either carelessness or ignorance, named their article as the tree of languages. A common mistake done by many Westerners.
Turkish and any language/language family that have nothing to do with the Nordic languages do not belong here.
The language tree specifically concerns the languages still spoken in the post-apocalyptic world the comic is set in. So she wasn’t trying to map all world languages, just the ones that her characters speak. It’s a really good comic, by the way.
*
… და რა ხდება ქართული ენის შესახებ ?? (… and what about Georgian ??)
A strange tree of languages that doesn’t mention Sanskrit, Latin, Japanese, or Chinese. Cute, but useless.
Looking more closely, I see that it declares itself a tree of “Nordic” languages. The speakers of Indic languages would have a good laugh at that! It’s the other way around. The Indic languages turned into the tiny handful of Nordic languages spoken by almost no one, not the other way around.
Very misleading– don’t like. Not educational– at all.
Can people here actually read? If so, look up the definition of “Old World” — the title in the centre of the map.
A ton of Slavic languages missing like Sorbian, Kashubian, Silesian, Rusyn, and Lusatian — all of which are still spoken living languages.
Under Indic languages “Gujarati” is missing. One of the largest after Marathi I believe.
Ouch.
Presumptuous — and perhaps even more spiteful than the perpetrators of the assumed offense.
Hey all of you whose amazing language is not on the tree:
Get over yourselves. Nobody will care about your dumb comments.
And Valencian too!
The BASQUE language or Euskara, is missing (like African languages, and many other). It’s Pre-IndoEuropean and noone knows about the origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language
Spanish also owes a lot to Arabic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_the_Spanish_language
Where is the Georgian Language?
I would also do a more in-depth research on hellnic and not be so fast to really credit the Greeks there..
Not only missing languages, all the leaves go to ENGLISH, so desproporcional: real subliminal crap.
Please don’t be so cranky, people. It’s the Indo-European tree. So, no, it doesn’t include Turkish and Basque. It doesn’t include Asian and African languages. And it doesn’t include Native American languages either. Or Semitic languages. That doesn’t make the creator of this particular diagram a white supremacist, any more than I’m a white supremacist.
On the other hand, people pointing out missing languages aren’t making “dumb comments” either.
Is there a diagram for every language everywhere? Maybe. I don’t know. Let’s go look for one. We don’t have to hold hands and skip while we look, but we should be able to have a civil conversation about it.
We need to create another tree with the arabic languages :D
You also forgot Sardinia with several languages “campidanese, barbaricino, gallurese, sulcitano”
who existe before latin.
Thank you for make a corection of your tree.
Shall i buy a poster of this beautyfull picture? There is it?
You’re right, Mardorwe. Why is there so much negativity?
also missing are the ancient Berber languages — Kabyle, Chaoui — it’s ridiculous to miss these out!
its strange that i couldn’t find “TAMIL” Language which is one of the oldest language in the world which still exist.
Disappointed you ignored all Native American languages!
creator of this sucks! georgian language is missing from this tree! :)
Please dear athor, change the title of this article. Indeed even if you talk about the old world, the nubian langage, and all african langage must be here and other from asia too. Words are important otherwise this May look like another démonstration of white supremacy and brainwash. We cannot have that in 2016
What about the indigenous languages of indigenous people — they don’t seem to be there
I am sorry, but your infography is not relevant as the tree of old world language families. What about Africa? since humanity, writing, reading, philosophy and so on originate from africa, do you think that there was no language at this place?
You conduct the ideology of european domination and by doing it you contribute to cognitive injustice. I suggest you to remove world in your title and put european.
I look for my native language spoken by ab. 13–14 million people in Central Europa. I am afraid it is a flippant work.
After all I have found hungarian but it does not change my opinoin.
Couple of issues already. 1) did you know Ukrainian is more different from Russian than Italian is from Spanish? Spanish is 33% different from Italian, while Ukrainian is 38% different from Russian. Obviously this isn’t depicted correctly on this tree. Second Obviously it would be better interpreted as a vine, a fungus or bamboo rather than a tree. English as it is has many gaelic origins. Sadly this really shouldn’t matter except many governments attempt to hide the true history of things. It’s important to know things true origins. For example, because of soviet occupation of Ukraine, many thousands of Ukraninian words were literally erased, and the language itself was deemed “little russian.” The truth is Ukranian pre-dates modern Russian, and the “russian” we know of today originated as the “kievien rus’ centered in Ukraine almost 5 centuries before Moscow (edit: AND st. petersburg) even existed (edit: even as place names!), and this is “slightly” accurately depicted at least on this branch. However it obviously has a Western Eurocentric bent to it. And why is not Danish linked to Uralic? (sorry armchair linguist) I’m sure real linguists would point out many other flaws in this.
There are many many more flaws to it than missing indo-european. For example…did you know Ukrainian is more different from Russian as Italian is from Spanish (Italian and Spanish are 33% similar while Ukrainian and Russian are 38% different?) A very poorly researched diagram indeed. And why does English not show it’s Gaelic connections? There are many many problems. Why is not Danish linked to Uralic? This is a misleading, misinforming diagram. I’m just an armchair linguist. I’m sure real linguists will find many many more problems. How does an armchair linguist do better than this person did?
Do you know anything about languages?
Which university degree do you have?
Most of the things here are wrong.
Please do better research before publishing.
Valencian is not considered a language. It is a dialect of Catalan, usually used mixed, by speakers, with Spanish(Castellano), as the Valencian vocabulary is somewhat limited.
That’s why it’s not here.
65% of English is derived from Latin, 35% from Germanic roots.
This tree has not grown properly.
so is Welsh and they have scots not Gaelic, missed out our Celtic languages
Even if this was for a comic it is still pretty damn racist to imply that the africans, arabs, and orientals will all be wiped out in this apocalyptic future while those on the map survive.
This graphic isn’t comprehensive, or as attractive, but it broadens the perspective a bit: http://eurotalk.com/blog/2015/06/03/the-language-forest-how-are-world-languages-related/
Going by the comments, perhaps the author should have asked a professor of languages and linguistics for assistance. It’s one thing to have an amateur interest in a subject, but it was perhaps unwise to publish something like this, with many omissions and possibly a good deal of speculation (not that academics don’t speculate!).
One of the oldest language I miss in you’re three the amazigh.Still spoken by a group bigger than 50 million people.
Unfortunately, this article does not include the main languages (Bantu-African, Altai and Sino-Tibetian languages..):(
Uralic languages is not a thin tree and not a part of hindo-europen family… Uralic language is a part of Ural-Altay language family… Learn it…
I think it’s a big mistake for you as an expert on the matter, not to include Turkic languages in your language tree as Turkic languages are part of the Uralic language family, very similar to Finnish and Hungarian.
Yes, this is a tree that shows the Indo-European and Uralic language families. Turkish is not part of these two language families. It’s not an oversight!
Georgian is a Kartvelian language, not related to Indo-European and Uralic, that’s all!
Baque is a language isolate and not part of the Indo-European and Uralic language families.
Nina, that is a very prejudiced and ignorant thing to say. The tree illustrates the Indo-European and Uralic languages which as far as we know are unrelated to the languages of Africa. Just like all modern humans are related in some way, so all languages are probably related, but just how Indo-European and Uralic are related to any of the languages of Africa is as yet poorly understood. I have never met a historical linguist who thought Africans were subhumans, that idea is your own.
Alien & Stranger, I’m afraid it’s the comments that are ignorant. They don’t understand that this is a tree that shows two (related) language families, not al the languages of the world. Any linguist can see that, you’d have to be ignorant about language families to not understand this.
Ferda Baraz, although Turkic is in some respects similar to Hungarian, it is unrelated to the Fenno-Ugric languages. Typological similarity and genetic relatedness are not the same thing!
Tamara, the Georgian language branches off а different tree, the kartvelian one!
Love to see the history and foundation of indigenous languages as part of the language tree
Would be truly amazing to see links between the very old and the newer languages!
Turgut Bey,
Clearly, Chinese (a Uralic language) cannot be omitted as well as Turkish. Especially, the impact of these strong languages on the Uralic distribution on the map. Funny though, not acknowledging the name Hakan or Attila coming from the same roots as Turkish, Finnish or Hungarian and excluding Turkish. Clearly this map has no scientific bearence.
Agree… somehow our Hungarian language missed out on the Finno-Ugric group… serious mistake if the author is a language expert…
The whining of some people here is pathetic. If you don’t like this language tree, make your own. It tells me a lot about your culture when all you do is to whine about exclusion of something.
I thought it was a great.
O my gosh , I am sick for people that create face history .
Totaly incorect .…,how is possible to publish that think .… Read please some ancient history .…
ABSOLUTE CRAP, lousy propaganda !
Minna Sundberg, the artist, was only tracing out Nordic languages. Perhaps you you give a try at languages from your region. :)
If the headline had been “some branches of the tree of language”, instead of its bold claim to be THE tree, you would have avoided a lot of criticism.
On a recent trip to Leeuwarden I learnt that Frisian is regarded as the closest language to English. Interesting to see it depicted in this way.
Hi
That tree is beautiful.
Where does Chinese and Japanese sprout then? And what we call Arabic in a general way but means so many different countries and prople?
Thank you
Armenian, a separate branch of Indo-European languages, missing, despite having 8–10 mln estimated native-speakers.
I believe welsh is the oldest European language
@Saba You thought “it was a great”.? OK. Also funny that, from my perspective, you too are whining about some other people whining-they’re not BTW- so.
Worth noting that Ural-Altaic scientifically considered to be a one single family that has two main branches. And it’s a much more natural idea than forced Indo-European family. Writer of this page messed up in two places; 1) he decided on a obtrusively ethnoentric, ill-educated title, 2) they went for the looks over scientific quality(again, on purpose).
Sad that.. it’s ignored… I feel ignorant and not done proper research
Unfortunately, the author somehow conveniently skipped the only complete language in the world, Sanskrit. Why and how not my concern but should be everybody else’s should it be speech including the advent of speech in human civilisation.
I think you missed gujarati language of western indo aryan
This map speaks as if there’s a white world only. It’s actually pretty racist.
I think I know the answer. Someone named Ivan Lanin from Indonesia posted this article on Facebook. He has a huge influence among Indonesian who learn language and linguistic. https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155807856969903&id=693539902&ref=bookmarks
Cheers,
Wahyu
With all due respect to the author, but what was the purpose of creating this language tree? Complete misrepresentation of the title.
According to Ethnologue (https://www.ethnologue.com/), there are more than 7,000 living languages across the world. Minna’s Sundberg’s work depicts only the Indo-European and Uralic branches of the language tree, as many readers have already pointed out. For those interested, there’s a course on Coursera entitled Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics (https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language) that’s an excellent introduction to the topic.
In the Slavic languages,South Slavic languages, which are the languages of the former Yugoslav republics MACEDONAN language is missing. It’s one of the oldest languages with it’s own alphabet.
You tree is not complete even if the intention is to depict only the Indo-European languages.
lower right side, it is there.
Maybe because there isn’t enough empiric data about these languages.
Russian language is not the Slavic language. It is same group as finno-ugrics.
MACEDONIAN LANGUAGE IS ONE OF THE 10 OLDEST LANGUAGES IN THE WORLD
These messages are interspersed with intelligent responses as well as rather poorly informed ones. The person, for example, who claimed that Russian isn’t Indoeuropean, but Finno-Ugric, has been terribly misinformed. All those who would enjoy learning about the sources of English, as well as the fundamentals of the science of linguistics are welcome to search through the pages of The Linguistics Club located at the following URL:
http://profejeff.blogspot.com/2007/
The blog was started ten years ago to provide information for my linguistics students. (I have an M.A. in Linguistics from the City University of New York). Its content is accurate. After I left the school, I no longer added to the blog, but you’re free to read through it and pose your own questions which I think will be relayed to me. Have fun looking, reading and adding to your own understanding of the place of English and other languages in the world. I hope you enjoy the read.
Where are some of the most important South Indian languages, I’ve Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. These languages are spoken by a large population of the world today. In fact, Tamily, one of the most ancient languages like Tamil is still flourishing.
You didn’t notice Macdonian, because it is out of proportion with nearby Bulgarian and Albanian (Macedonian should be bigger, because Bulgarian speakers are 7 milion, Albanians speakers are 6 million, Macedonian speakers are 1.5 million, but on this picture Macedonian speakers are not 4 or 5 times, but 10 times less)
I am sorry if mistaken but unfortunately I can not find Georgian Language in the tree branches. Georgian language — from Kartvelian language family is one of the unique and the OLDEST language in the world and you have missed it! To my humble opinion, when you have an ambition to write down a “tree of languages”, at least you have to know the thing precisely and thoroughly. And also FYI — Georgian scripts were inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2016.
Please bear this in mind.
პატივისცემით
(Yours Faithfully)
Dont worry.. thats the root for all above.!
You people crying racism and saying it doesn’t include your language should take not that THIS TREE REPRESENT THE LANGUAGES OF MOSTLY INDOEUROPEAN DESCENT. It’s not ignoring your language, it’s just representing a certain group.
More over, other language families (asian, african, native american, etc) are harder to depict mostly because we don’t have enough data about them.
Of course, however, title is very misleading. The world is not only caucasian and indoeuropean.
I think y’all are missing the Forest in your focus on this one Tree. Of course, other trees could and should be drawn, but the politics of post-colonialism is still getting in the way. By all means, keep pointing all the beauty that can be found in your own linguistic trees, but maybe learning more about Finnish couldn’t hurt. I only just recently learned that Georgia has its own unique alphabet and I was glad to notice that this was pointed out. I’ve also heard that there is another unique alphabet in West Africa. I agree that all of the World’s Languages should be appreciated more, not less…
Many major languages from South India are completely missed out, kannada, telugu, Tamil, malayalam, kodava, tulu etc. Al
Don’t call it Tree of Languages. Call it Tree of European Languages ONLY! Chinese, Bahasa, Filipino, Pacific Islands were missed out, so this tree presented is only a subset of the whole.
You should consider the influente of the french in english language, not directly from latin. It is an enormous error.
Where is Tamil here? Tamil is equally old as Sanskrit. Where are the other three Southern Indian languages; Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam?? Where is Gujarati? And the Marathi group are not Southern zone but Western and South-western zone. The southern zone are the Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam which are missing.
This list made from..UK…Sapienti sat…
Bat has some similarities with…Serbian language…over 3000 words…Regards from…Israel…
Si in your view, in the “old world” they speak English in Australia and Spanish in South America … but do not speak neither French nor English in Afrixa?
I live in Australia and in the ” old world” people did not speak English.
The French language population is much bigger if you add Africa . The total is over 450 million people who use French as their official language with the Democratic Republic of Congo the number one French speaking country (77 million) bigger than France (65 million).
This Infographic looks nice but is incorrect.
Dear authors and creators of the map, you’ve done great work bringing more knowledge to people. Thank you for this.
Of course there’ll be people saying your work is not good enough because they think it should include all 400+ Indo-European languages, including those with 20k speakers, or mention Turkic group and other non I.E. languages, or place Ukrainian farther from Russian, or pays less attention to English, or more to French, and so on.
Again, your work is great, and it well delivers exactly what it was created for: spreads some basic knowledge to non-professionals. Whoever wants to see a full tree, or estimate how large specific “leaves” should be, basing on dozens of competing linguistic theories about certain I.E. languages should spend some time and read books instead of hoping to get all the data they need presented (in a way they like) all in one picture.
Where is Georgian language — ქართული ენა ?
AND FROM FRENCH !!!
All means, keep pointing all the beauty that can be found in your own linguistic trees, but maybe learning more about Finnish couldn’t hurt. I only just recently learned that Georgia has its own unique alphabet and I was glad to notice that this was pointed out. This tree metaphor to a delightfully lavish extreme, tracing, say, how Indo-European linguistic roots sprouted a variety of modern-day living languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Italian and, of course, our Language of the Future. The size of the branches and bunches of leaves represent the number of speakers of each language at different times: the likes of English and Spanish have sprouted into mighty vegetative clusters, while others, like, Swedish, Dutch, and Punjabi, assert a more local dominance over their own, separately grown regional branches.
My kvetch: the orientation of the tree. It should match the continental orientation of the language groups concerned. West to the left, east to the right as in the Wester-European detail below.
im vegan
2wjdhewkafkahsdj
gr8 m8
Total Crap!!
No proper research done.
It is difficult to please everyone, but I like your suggestion best Paul.
African languages are not Indo-European related. Look at the chart again, it is about INDO-EUROPEAN languages.
Look up Afro-Asiatic for your answer.
Artistic and cute but useless and may mislead people.
Where is Basque in all this though? Its not depicted anywhere on the tree, yet it IS a language, and one that stands by itself at that. Would be interested to see where it fits on this. Thanx!
How about the Basque?
I am a South Indian , I don’t see Tamil Language in this tree. It’s one of the Classical languages. You should mention its origin , you missed out all the prominent South Indian Languages like Telugu , Malayalam and Kannada born from Ancient Tamil version. Tamil has 80 million active and Native speakers. Please look into it.
Lighten up. I don’t see the Algonquin or Iroquois language of some of my ancestors but I understand these are the branches of the Indo-European language tree and it’s simply fascinating. I want a poster of this map.
Can you enlist the sino-tibetian languages?
This graphic is not meant to be a comprehensive listing or a scholarly work. It’s poster art from a postapocalyptic webcomic: Stand Still. Stay Silent, which takes place in what is left of the Nordic countries, and the language diagram reflects that geography.
Hi, why is there no.Hebrew in the chart? And also Arabic? Thanks. E
funny that a whole continent was colonized and its local languages are destroyed and replaced with e.g. latin and english then is put here instead of the languages native speakers’ origin
@Susansheppard, you can purchase a print in the store for the webcomic: https://hivemill.com/collections/stand-still-stay-silent/products/stand-still-stay-silent-language-family-tree-poster
It must be a foolish, half-boiled representation of World Languages. The ancient old TAMIL, more than 10,000 years old with highly rich old Literature than any other Language is missing.…. or must have intentionally omitted. However both are unacceptable and highly condomnable. Don’t mislead.
How you can consider Catalan as a language??? Is only a dialect…in this way you ll have to also say something about Valencian, Basque and anothers dialects which all countries have.…is realy strange.
Albanian, with it’s own unique branch and the oldest of the lot.
Respect for the old seadog! ❤
To be honest with you, the slavic leanguages are more related to indoiranian than to westearopean. The most of slavic have many words from latine, but the root words and the grammar is not west.
The primary difference between Indoeuropean tonqyes are settim and kentum.
There was evoluation of one of the sound, witch in gaelic, italic and garmanian gropu evolueted into K in the other S.
The name os taken from pronancation of word a houndert. In old geramnic was kundert, in old latine was centum, c pronance like a enslish c in the word cat.
In setim was pronance like s. In polish sto, in urdu set. POlish 500 ist pięćset.
Albanian is related to slavic. Part of setim group.
Albanian is not related to Slavic. It has nothing to do with Slavic languages. It developed 2000 years before anything resembling Slavic. Get the reference from the lingustic science and don’t presume things. You are not writting coments on You Tube here.
The tital is deceptive.
Where is Hebrew? Aramaic? Arabic languages? Tamil?
Some of the most ancient languages?
The trunk and branches suggest the original source of languages.
This is misinformation.
Where are all the OTHER languages? This is very Euro-centric, mostly. I see no trace of hundreds of other tongues, let alone derivation of e.g. Native American languages, Hawaiian/Pacifica tongues, to say nothing of the many that grew in the Indian subcontinent and Africa.
It’s fine to just do your own thing, but call it what it is, not “the tree of languages” implying that this is all there is. At least my old Webster’s dictionary had a more complete picture in the front, and that was fifty+ years ago! Someone’s either keeping all the goodies hidden away, or they’ve been asleep all this time!
French is not even in the top ten of mother tongues inthe world. Actually has the same number of mother tongue speakers as German. Spanish and Chinese are the most spoken mother tongues. The projection of 750 millions of French speakers is fake even Northern Africa also speaks Arabic and Rwanda shifted to English .
Hi there. I don’t see the Vasc language or Euskeras (Same Language) in this tree…
Laughable omission of the biggie,Latin, now being used more and more for recreation. And Latin, ubiquitous in Medicine, the key to understanding Law foundations and clear thinking, western literary culture, the structures of grammar.
I can not find turkish languages
lost in translation (MAGYAR)
Where’s Georgian branch on this tree?! C’mon guys, Georgia has its own alphabet, culture and history, much longer than most languages on the map! Georgian alphabet was derived from one of the Semitic alphabets around 6th century BC.
What about Tamil and Malayalam languages?
Pardon me, but where is Georgian? 😎 The country with one of the unique 14 alphabets of the world, maybe I am mistaken and could not find it? This is one of the ancient languages…
Hebrew and Arabic are omitted. As well as Ladino. Yiddish derives from both Hebrew and Germanic languages.
All you folks complaining — this is regarding the Indo-European languages ONLY. There are MANY other language groups such as Austronesian, Dravidian, and Sino-Tibetan to name just a few off the top of my head.
There is a great lecture series called: “The Story of Human Language” by John McWhorter. I highly recommend it — especially for those of you who don’t realize there is a difference between Indo-European and other language groups. I hope you find it enlightening and helpful!
Cheers :)
You answered your own question. Turkic languages are their own group and therefore not part of the Indo-European tree.
Where’s Gaelic — Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx? Why is ‘Scots’ with English (it’s Gaelic) — that’s incorrect. Galician is also a form of Gaelic. Scots should not be connected with English — also incorrect.
A simple google search shows that Turkish has been excluded our language trees are more complex that this graphic.
“Turkish belongs to the Altay branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic family, same as Finnish and Hungarian. It is the westernmost of the Turkic languages spoken across Central Asia and is generally classified as a member of the South-West group, also known as the Oguz group.”
All About Turkey › turkish.htm is
Australian indigenous languages are not represented on the tree. Is there a separate tree for these languages as well as trees for native American, Inuit, Pacific, African and SE Asian languages.
Pretty sure the Frisian roots are connected the Dutch ones as they are almost are one language. You might check it out because this does not make sense and is completly off
There are a few dialects of Gaelic missing. Cornish, Scottish, and Mansh (I cant remember how that’s written, but that of the people spoken on the Isle of Man)!
There are NO “slavic languages”, by the way. Wanna know why? Well, it’s because there is NO such a thing like “slavic people”. A genetic category like “slavic” doesn’t exist. You might want to look into the ancient Greek word “slaves” — find its meaning and find whom the Greeks were calling by this word.
yes I’m very angry about it… thats weird how they omit a language that has been spoken since the born of the time!
The oldest of the Dravidian languages is Tamil, spoken by well over 300 million Indians; however, you mention Hindi.
correction: over 80 million/ not 300
Albanian Language missing which is maybe the first language in the world and very old!
This is so pathetic!
Same I wished to ask . Thank you, madam for registering the comment.
No language would be complete without ” TAMIL” , ” The Primary Classic Language ” of the world.
why isn’t Arabic language mentioned on that tree, while it’s very old language, older than many of other languages you mentioned on that tree???
Textbook example of something literally being taken out of context and that leading to inappropriate complaints about exclusion, ignorance, worse, yada yada. In the work this is taken from, the main characters are Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Finns. An important detail of the work, one that gives it a wonderful “texture”, is the differing degrees of mutual intelligibility of the languages these characters speak. The only reason a truncated Uralic is included is to visually show how Finnish is “up another tree” from the rest of the languages relevant to the story. So, why no [insert your not included language here]? Because it’s not relevant to the work from which the graphic was taken. Simple as that.
Thank you for commenting this! The Basque language predates all Indo-European languages.
I was also pretty surprised that turkic languages were not represented at all. Also mongolian, tibetian, japanese, chinese and many many more didn’t find their place here. I don’t think its meant to be really comprehensive from what i understand.
If French is to be the language of the future, they will have to let it expand. If what I read long ago is correct, there is an effort to keep foreign words from the language and control new words. A language of the future will contain words from many older languages, in my opinion.
Something that seems obvious to me is that the tree is not a scientific treatise. It’s a work of art. It doesn’t have to be all encompassing, it just “IS”. Enjoy it and quit quibbling.
What about Hungarian.…one of the biggest empires ever.
In language tree where is Tamil Language. Missed a major language
No Turkic language is a big branch in Uralic languages right next to Hungarian. One shouldn’t start a job with incomplete knowledge, wouldn’t you agree?
it seems that there‘s some scientific racism in these circles
A very strange language tree !? Lots of living languages are missing and some non-existent “languages” have been added !? Where are the; Tamil, Kannada, Kashubian, Silesian, Sorbian, Lausitz, Rusyn, Georgian, Basque, Bantu …? How come there is such a thing as; Croatian and Bosnian “language”, while we all know the Serbian language is the auxiliary ‑Lingua franca in those recently created artifitial nations, but there are no Mongolian, Tibetan, or the real ancient and still existing Khoisan languages!?!?
Mazandaran language has more than six million speakers in Iran.
Mazandaran or Tabari is one of the most important languages of northern Iran.
Where is Tamil language.
Oldest language in the world,
Missed a major language.
Before commenting on this article PLEASE BE AWARE that the writer has lazily taken this diagram out of context (and also misrepresents it as a complete language tree). The graphic is intended to show the linguistic relationship between Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Finnish. It is a page taken from a Finnish graphic novel set in post-apocalyptic Scandinavia, and the illustrator doesn’t claim to represent all Indo-European languages, only to show how those Scandinavian languages fit within the indo-european and uralic language families. There are numerous language families, and indo-european only encompasses the 5th most distinct languages (though today some of its languages are the most widely spoken globally). FYI, many languages spoken in the south of India, like Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam belong to the Dravidian language family, though they often have loan-words from Indo-European languages.
Tagalog, spoken by almost all of the Philippines
Filipinos: Are we a joke to you??
Hi Colin,
I too believe that French would be one of most speaking language by 2050. As for now its a second most useful language in the world for business along with English.
I too believe n learning French language, while browsing I found few language learning platforms like Edvanza, Simplilearn etc. who offer different courses on languages.
Just wondering if there is/are tree(s) of all the Asian countries languages?
That is because the Basque language is an isolat, not part of any language group. It is truely unique!
Tamil is not really an ancient language as it came into existence in proto form with kannada, but it is debatable. Not including these, maybe due to lack of knowledge.
Thank you for mentioning that. I spent 10 minutes looking for Chinese. The chart is terrible. I found a very good chart decades ago. I wish I still had it. I think it started with 2 sides and I think one side was the languages that use letters like English (I can’t think of what the letters are called). The other side was the languages that use symbols such as Chinese. That is my vague memory, but the chart did cover everything. I told a friend of mine that learning German and Russian was easier than learning Chinese and she thought I was saying that learning Russian and German was easy and was disagreeing with me. She was speaking Spanish and I was speaking English, and I was using a translator to translate our conversation. I tried to explain to her that for me learning German and Russian was easier than learning Chinese. I did not mention pinyin to her, but even that is difficult because of the inflections. I see now in Google that the letters are called Latin, but I thought there was a different term.