This Amazing Tree That Shows How Languages Are Connected

[JustJohn or JJ]

This Amazing Tree That Shows How Languages Are Connected Will Change The Way You See Our World

3 days ago by​ Andrius

Did you know that most of the different languages we speak today can actually be placed in only a couple of groups by their origin? This is what illustrator Minna Sundberg has captured in an elegant infographic of a linguistic tree which reveals some fascinating links between different tongues.

Using the research data from Ethnologue, Minna has used a tree metaphor to illustrate how all major European, and even plenty of Eastern languages can be grouped into Indo-European and Uralic “families”. The whole image is dotted with languages, with bigger leaves representing those with the most native speakers. But even this detailed image doesn’t cover the immense variety of languages out there: “Naturally, most tiny languages didn’t make it on the graph,” the artist explained to io9. “There’s literally hundreds of them in the Indo-European family alone and I could only fit so many on this page, so most sub-1 mil. speaker languages that don’t have the official status somewhere got the cut.”

Bigger leaves represent more people using the language as their native tongue



The European branch splits in three: Slavic, Romance and Germanic. A rather complicated relationship between the Slavic languages is visible



It also shows the Germanic roots of English language



Surprisingly, unlike its Scandinavian neighbors, the Finnish language belongs to Uralic family



The Indo-Iranian group reveals the links between Hindi and Urdu as well as some regional Indian languages like Rajasthani



www.boredpanda.com/illustrated-linguistic-tree-languages-minna-sundberg/

[pieter]

Dear John,

It is amazing John. From one side it is beautiful and great that great variety of languages, from the other side from my European experience the differences between languages can give cause to tensions, conflict, misunderstandings and etc. An example is *the case of that nice blond Polish lady in Poland with her strong Polish slav accent in English, and the intolerance of the Brits towards her. In the Netherlands I speak general Dutch and I have a hard time understanding some of my colleagues for instance, because they speak with a heavy Low Saxon, Southern-Dutch (Limburgian) regional language or the heavy Arnhem city dialect, which is a mixture of a local language mixed with the imported The Huage (South Hollandish) city dialect of workers from the Hague who moved to Arnhem in the east in the First half of the 20th century. It's interesting how laguages come to existence and how they change in time.

* jagahost.proboards.com/thread/20670/get-polish-accent?page=1&scrollTo=106546

I also have to put some effort sometimes to understand my Afghan colleague, who has a Pashtun background and speaks Dutch with a heavy Afghan accent. In the past I had Iranian, Iraqi Kurd, Turkish and Moroccan colleagues, each with their own accent. And my mother has Polish accent in her Dutch. Some words are hard for me to understand or sound like other words, because Polish people heave difficulties with the Dutch H and hard G. So sometimes a Dutch G becomes a H and a Dutch H a soft G or something inbetween a H and G. So the nice Polish lady in England who lived there for 27 years isn't the only one with troubles with her accent. I believe that I heard that Jaga had some problems with her accent in Idaho too. (Correct me if I am wrong Jaga).

If we all were just a little bit more patient and could have a little bit interest in the background, language and culture of another person, this world would be a better and more tolerant place. It seems that in Europe some people more more towards an ethnic, cultural, language and peoples base. Countries, nations, regions and cities which become like a city state.

Cheers,
Pieter