Have you ever wondered how languages came to existence? I’m sure you have, well all have. But, what astonishes us more is how there are so many of them around the world. But, what if I was to tell you that the thousands of different languages that we speak today were placed at a single origin. Sounds strange and crazy right? Trust me it isn’t. This amazing tree shows us how they are connected to each other.
Illustrator, Minna Sundberg, has captured a mind-boggling infographic of a linguistic tree which reveals some fascinating links between different tongues.
She used the research data from the Ethnologue and has created a tree metaphor to represent all the different tongues we speak in and has dotted down their origin.
The amazing tree of origin of language as explained by her, consisted of the trunk as origins and the leaves as the language used. The bigger leaves represented the greater number of people that speak in it.
The commonly spoken tongues among them are, English, Spanish, Italian, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, French, Portuguese.
Here is the detailed description of the different branches on the tree!
1. The European Branch.
The European Branch serves as the origin for the Slavic, Romance, Germanic. But the Slavic relationship gets a bit complicated when you see the branch.
2. The English Branch.
Well, English has it’s origin roots from German. The Swedish and Danish origins are also from Germanic roots.
3. The Finnish Branch.
Surprisingly, unlike the neighbouring tongues, like the Scandinavian branches. The Finnish has its origin roots from the Uralic.
4. The Indo-Iranian Branch.
The Indo- Iranian group reveals the links between Hindi and Urdu. This also reveals the several links between some regional tongues such as Marathi Rajasthani. The Bengali origin, however, is connected to the Eastern Indo origin, which subdivides further into Assamese, Odiya.
read also: 10 Curse Words We All Use But Don’t Know Their Origin! Didn’t expect #6!
