Rubenstein Ch. 5
Subject:
Human Geography [1]
Tags:
Language [10]
Key Issue 2: Why is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European Branches
Language Family - a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history
Language Branch - a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago
Indo European is divided into eight branches. Large numbers of people speaks the first four, Indo-Iranian, Romance, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic. They are clustered in South Asia, southwestern Europe and Latin America, northwestern Europe and North America, and Eastern Europe.
English and German are closely related. They are part of a language group West Germanic – they are structurally similar and have many words in common.