Not all languages are related, but they do seem to form related groups. Most languages that were originally European, some of which are now spoken all over the world, are thought to have developed from an ancient and unknown language those linguists known as “Proto Indo-European”.
Most languages belong to language families. A language family is a group of related languages that developed from a common historic ancestor, referred to as protolanguage (proto– means ‘early’ in Greek). The ancestral language is usually not known directly, but it is possible to discover many of its features by applying the comparative method that can demonstrate the family status of many languages. Sometimes a protolanguage can be identified with a historically known language. Thus, provincial dialects of Vulgar Latin are known to have given rise to the modern Romance languages, so the *Proto-Romance language is more or less identical to Latin. Similarly, Old Norse was the ancestor of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. Sanskrit was the protolanguage of many of the languages of the Indian subcontinent, such as Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu. Further back in time, all these ancestral languages descended, in turn, from one common ancestor. We call this ancestor Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Language families can be subdivided into smaller units called branches. For instance, the Indo-European family has several branches, among them, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic.
Sometimes it is relatively easy to establish relationships among languages. Let us look at the Romance languages. We know that Italian is a descendant of Latin, a language that was spoken in Italy two thousand years ago and one which left a great number of written documents. The Roman conquest helped spread Latin throughout Europe where it eventually developed into regional dialects. When the Roman Empire broke up, these regional dialects evolved into the modern Romance languages that we know today: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and others. These languages form the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. By looking at the word for ‘water’ in three Romance languages, one can easily see the similarities among them.
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