The language tree model visualizes the development of languages and aims to find the mother tongue of all humans. It is similar to a family tree but has limitations due to missing evidence and assumptions. English is an example of how a linguistic family tree works, with its various dialects and sublanguages related to Proto-Germanic. The creation of a language tree model faces challenges such as the complexity of languages and the lack of concrete proto-languages.
A language tree model is a means of visualizing the development of languages. Strictly speaking, this is the linguistic equivalent of a family tree. It is also fraught with the same problems of missing evidence and assumptions to fill in the gaps. The ultimate goal of the language tree model is to find the mother tongue of all humans, if such a language ever existed. The creation of such tree models is part of language comparison and is the result of many studies of the origins and commonalities of languages around the world.
The model itself is often presented in a similar way to the family tree. Family trees tend to start with a single couple and then record their children and their children’s children and so on until the tree reaches the present day. While there are exceptions, the language tree model is more like a real tree, whereas instead of pairings, a branch will split into a number of other branches and so on until the tree reaches modern or terminal languages.
Exceptions include languages such as English, which even in its old form was an amalgam of a number of related languages such as Angle – today’s Angeln in southern Denmark -, Saxon, Jute and Frisian. In this sense, the branches split from Proto-Germanic, only to later merge to form English. The tree model of English is littered with dominant waves of linguistic ideas, from verb cases and sentence structures to how to pluralize nouns. For example, the subject-verb-object formation comes from West Saxon while the plural ‘s’ is from Northumbrian, a variety of Angle and Jute.
English is a good example of how a linguistic family tree works. English is related, through those various dialects and sublanguages, to Proto-Germanic. The Nordic languages such as Swedish, Faroese and Icelandic also spring from the Proto-Germanic branch; Dutch languages such as Frisian, Dutch and Limburgish; and High German from Austrian to High German. The Proto-Germanic language, in turn, branched off from the Germano-Slavic branch of languages, which is a branch of the Proto-Indo-European language.
There are a number of branching causes. These may include the relative isolation of communities, which develop their own distinct vocabularies and conventions, as well as migration. Interacting and competing languages have a great influence on the fragmentation of proto-languages. Some languages like Serbo-Croatian chip because one group uses one alphabet and the other uses a different one.
There are a number of problems with creating a language tree model. The biggest problem of all is the supposed proto-languages. Essentially, there are no concrete proto-languages, and each proto-language probably had dozens if not hundreds of dialects and subdivisions.
Another factor undermining the language tree model is its inability to demonstrate the complexity of languages. As seen with English, languages are likely to pick up all sorts of influences from other languages that surround them. Some languages can be fusions of different languages such as creating creole languages in the Americas and Africa. Others, like Hungarian, began as a blend of the Mongolian languages like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, but picked up all sorts of influences along the way, including Turkish and Latin.
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