We have talked about our family tree in terms of how we are related to chimpanzees and other great apes. We can apply the same concept to thinking about the relationship between different language families. This graphic from mentalfloss.com is a helpful representation of both diversity and relatedness! One application of this concept is called “Glottochronology”, where the relatedness of languages is used to think about human migrations in the past; the maps in the center of this graphic show the complementarity of linguistic research and historical documentation and archaeology.
