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.
Click
here for a larger version, thanks to io9.
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.
You can see
the full version at io9, and order
a print for your wall here.
Sources: io9, Stand Still. Stay
Silent website
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