Classification of Languages

This article describes the principles underlying the classification of languages in this encyclopedia. Where possible, a genetic classification is used, that is, one in which the languages are grouped in families on the basis of descent from a common ancestor. In the ideal case, the successive splittings of the protolanguage can be represented by a branching tree diagram. However, features of languages can be spread from one language to another, and this diffusion can obscure genetic relatedness. When linguists are not in a position to reconstruct the relationship between languages, they tend to resort to lexicostatistics, whereby percentages of common roots are simply counted using a list of ‘basic’ words, which are assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. The article concludes with a summary of the actual classification.