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How Are Languages Connected?

Are you aware that most of the languages that are spoken today can actually be placed into a couple of groups by their origin? This is what Minna Sundberg reveals in an elegant infographic of a linguistic tree which reveals fascinating links between different languages.

 

Using research data from Ethnologue, Sundberg was able to create a tree metaphor that illustrates how all major European, and many Eastern languages can be grouped into Indo-European and Uralic “families”. The whole image is full of languages, with bigger leaves representing those with the most native speakers. However, even this detailed image does not cover the immense variety of languages that exist.

Sundberg explains that “naturally, most tiny languages didn’t make it onto the graph. There’s literally hundreds of them in the Indo-European family alone and I could only fit so many on this page, so most sub-1 million speaker languages that don’t have official status somewhere got cut.”

 
Click on images to enlarge
 
The Way Our Languages Are Connected
The European branch splits into three: Romance, Slavic, Germanic. A rather complicated relationship between the Slavic languages is visible. 
The Way Our Languages Are Connected
It also shows the Germanic roots of the English language. 
The Way Our Languages Are Connected
Surprisingly, unlike its Scandinavian cousins, the Finnish language belongs to the Uralic family.
The Way Our Languages Are Connected
The Indo-Iranian group reveals the links between Hindi and Urdu as well as some regional Indian languages such as Rajasthani. 
The Way Our Languages Are Connected

Source:  boredpanda

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