Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Linguistic family tree reveals the roots of Nordic languages

Science Alert










This family tree illustrates the lineages of Indo-European and Uralic languages though-out human history, and how some of the world's most-used languages came to be. And it's pretty enough to put on your wall.

Sweden-based artist, Minna Sundberg, has created an enormous linguistic family tree to illustrate how the earliest Nordic languages gave rise to the incredible diversity of native tongues that exist around the world today.


The infographic was created as part of Sundberg's webcomic, called Stand Still. Stay Silent, set 90 years after a catastrophic event that obliterated all but a tiny population of survivors in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, which is why Asian languages were not included in this case.

Working with Ethnologue, the most comprehensive online catalogue for the world’s known living languages, Sundberg starts with the Indo-European family and works her way up to widely used modern languages such as Hindi, English, Spanish, and German, and also the smaller family of Uralic languages, native to Hungary, Finland, and Estonia.

The name "Uralic" comes from this linguistic family's original homeland, called Urheimat, thought to have been situated in the Ural Mountains, which extend north to south through western Russia.

Writing at her website, Sundberg mentions that as there are several hundred languages that spring from the Indo-European line, she could only include those that currently have more than one million speakers in her infographic. 

Of course, the evolution of language involves many highly complex interactions and minutiae that couldn't be represented in this format, but we still think it's a pretty awesome way to visualise the lineage of language.