Language Families—Clues to the Past

How language families are distributed gives information about how humans have spread through migration. Generally, where a language family’s members are most numerous is where the family emerged, because there has been more time in the original location for the languages to diverge into new ones. This principle shows that the massive Austronesian family, now spread across Southeast Asia’s islands out across the South Seas to Polynesia, began on the small island Formosa, where two dozen languages representing three separate subfamilies are spoken. Similar facts shed light on the history of Africa and North America.

Depending on one’s metrics for counting them, there are at least dozens and at most hundreds of language families in the world. Their distribution across the planet often gives us clues as to how humans have migrated over time.