5. Retell the text. Language families

A language family is a group of languages that have a common origin. Linguists establish comparatively their sound systems, vocabulary, and grammar. Among the most important language families are the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Indo-Chinese, Malayo-Polynesian and Semitic.

Various branches exist within language families. For example, in the Indo-European family Germanic and Italic are subfamilies, and the Romance languages are a subgroup of the Italic.

Proto-Germanic gave rise to Dutch, English, German and the Scandinavian tongues. Proto-Romance gave rise to French, Italian, Spanish and other tongues. French, German, Italian, Russian and English are Indo-European languages, but French and Italian are more closely related than Italian and German or English and Russian.

Linguists can trace the relationship of languages by comparing words in one language with words having the same meaning in another language. For instance, if we compare words in English and German, we find ‘hand and Hand’, ‘lips and Lippen’, ‘lungs and Lungen’. In addition there are some similarities in grammatical structures.

The relationships of this kind are characteristic of languages that belong to the same language family. Such relationships do not exist across language family lines. Thus it may be established that Greek, the Slavic languages (such as Russian), the Celtic languages (such as Irish) and even some of the languages of India (such as Sanskrit) are members of the Indo-European family but it has been proved that Finnish and Hungarian are not members of this language family.