1486: How to Differentiate Language Families Jan 6, 2018

English belongs to the West Germanic language family, which belongs to the Germanic language family, which belongs to the Indo-European language family. All of this is fairly straightforward, but in other types of classifications—such as taxonomy with its "domain; kingdom; phylum; class..."—there are different names. One might expect linguists would be very happy to create new words or new definitions, but commonly this doesn't happen. However, for clarity, this is often talked about in the terms of 'primary language families' and so on, with primary language families not having any further relations, such as the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Kartvelian language families respectively.
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