The History of English (PODCAST): The Indo-European Family Tree

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2012/07/02/episode-3-the-indo-european-family-tree-2/

I have already spoken about this marvelous podcast, done by Kevin Stroud. I have been listening to it for a while and realised that this episode would be an interesting one to share.

I am working with many adults who are learning languages and in my experience, the classification of the Indo-European languages is something that the students are most interested in. As I have noticed in a few countries I visited, there is no general knowledge of language history, as it is not something taught in schools. Nevertheless, there is a lot of curiosity. Whenever some acquaintances realise that I studied languages, the first question that emerges is about language groups and its classification.

This podcast is made for all the people who share the same curiosity and are or are not linguists, philologists or language teachers. In the same manner, this episode explains in a very simple and clear way, the classification and the connection between English and some of the languages from this group. 

Try not to forget that the episode is only about the Indo-European group of languages. There are many other big language groups such as: Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European (explained in this episode of the podcast) and Afro-Asiatic. 

Based on the speaker count, Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European are the largest ones. These two together count over 4,6 billion speakers. The two most spoken languages from these two groups are English (Indo-European) and Mandarin Chinese (Sino-Tibetan).

By the language count, Niger-Congo and Austronesian are the two largest groups. As a result of the stunning language diversity in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, each of these groups has over 1000 languages! And in the whole world, there are somewhere between 6000 and 7100 languages, depending on how many speakers you use to define a language. Usually, we say that you need a group of at least 1000 people who speak the same language in order to count that language with all the world languages. However, there are some linguists who count even some languages which are spoken by a group of 50 or 100 people.

As always, thank you for reading.  

Enjoy and investigate because the world is one big mystery!