Indo-European Languages

An extragalactic visitor examining the languages of the world today would be quickly struck by the many close similarities in grammar and vocabulary among French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian—sufficient for speakers of one language to understand, with some difficulty, the others—and might wonder how that situation came about. Armed with a knowledge of history, we could tell our visitor that the areas in which these languages are spoken were originally settled by speakers of Latin as the Roman Empire expanded, and we can trace, through historical documents, the gradual emergence of regional differences that led from Latin to the modern languages. Although Latin is often considered to be a “dead” language, it is anything but dead, for all of these languages are in fact just local varieties of living Latin as it is still spoken after 2,000 years.

As described in this entry, this picture of the history of Latin and the documentation of the slow changes that led to the present-day regional differences provide us with a model for understanding the nature of language change. From this we recognize the following:

• 1.
  Change is natural and inevitable in language.
• 2.
  All languages are constantly undergoing change.
• 3.
  Languages do not deteriorate or improve in the process of change.
• 4.
  No language is better or worse, or more logical, than another.
• 5.
  No “pure” language exists.

Thus, classical Latin was no more logical or precise than the modern languages, nor are they less logical or precise than Latin. They are simply different.

Linguists have most often used the family tree model as a way of illustrating the development of regional varieties from an earlier stage of a language. Thus, we could depict the descent of the Romance languages from Latin in a family tree format (omitting Romanian) (see figure below).

Although such a diagram provides a useful picture of relationships, it distorts reality by omitting all the intermediate local varieties, and in treating each of the named entities as if it were a uniform reality. What we think of as a “language” is actually a collection of more or less mutually intelligible varieties, some of which are more socially and politically privileged than others. When we closely examine language situations such as this one in geographic context, we find that a boundary cannot be drawn between any of these languages. Rather, there is a continuum of local varieties on which political borders have been arbitrarily imposed, frequently by war. For this reason, it is often said that a “language” is really only a socially prestigious regional variety with an army.

Latin in turn was originally just one of several local varieties known from historical records to have been spoken on the Italian peninsula (including Osean and Umbrian), which we can assume were all [Page 403]descended from a common ancestor, dubbed Italic (see figure above).

This model of change provided by Latin and the modern Romance languages can be applied to enable us to reconstruct languages for which we have no written record. For example, comparing English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and the extinct language Gothic, we see numerous similarities in vocabulary and grammar. On this basis, we can classify these into a “language family,” usually called Germanic, and we can reconstruct many of the features of what we presume to have been the original parent language.

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