What Are Your Favourite Language Families?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The question is in the title. A couple of remarks, though.

  • You can choose up to 5 families.

  • The poll was limited to 20 items, so I had to make choices. Sorry if your favourite isn’t in there, but you can pick “other” and tell us why.

  • Some language families are very firmly established while others are more controversial. I have marked the latter with “?”

  • The list of languages between brackets is by no means exhaustive. It’s just meant as an indication of some of the main ones, chosen in terms of demographics, historical and cultural importance or just plain personal preference, roughly in that order.

  • Afroasiatic (Arabic, Hebrew, Hausa, Amharic, Kabyle, Ancient Egyptian)
  • Niger–Congo ? (Swahili, Yoruba, Fula, Shona, Sesotho, Zulu)
  • Khoisan ? (Nama, ǃXóõ)
  • Algonquian (Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Cree, Mohican, Mi’kmaq, Powhatan)
  • Iroquoian (Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk)
  • Dené–Yeniseian ? (Ket, Tlingit, Navajo, Apache)
  • Siouan (Mandan, Crow, Lakota, Dakota)
  • Uto-Aztecan (Shoshoni, Comanche, Hopi, Nahuatl)
  • Mayan (Classic Maya, Kʼicheʼ, Yucatec, Tzeltal)
  • Quechuan (Quechuan, Aymara)
  • Austronesian (Malagasy, Indonesian, Javanese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Maori)
  • Dravidian (Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam)
  • Indo-European (English, French, Russian, Greek, Farsi, Hindi)
  • Kartvelian (Georgian, Mingrelian)
  • Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan)
  • Kra–Dai (Thai, Lao)
  • Turkic (Turkish, Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek)
  • Uralic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sami, Mari)
  • Isolates (Japanese, Korean, Basque, Sumerian)
  • Other
0 voters
2

I picked Algonquian, Uralic, and Indo-European. I’ve got a personal interest in these families, since they contain the languages spoken by me and/or my recent ancestors. I also picked “Other” because I love the languages constructed (virtually) ex nihilo by various writers of science fiction and fantasy.

3

I chose Indo-European because I speak English.

I speak chiShona (badly) because I was taught it at school. I can have a conversation with a fellow Zimbabwean in chiShona - but only if we are both drunk.

I chose Bahasa Indonesia (the correct name) because I found the spoken version very easy to learn, though apparently the formal version is very complicated.

4

Indo-European because I speak English and a few other IE languages.

AfroAsiatic because I am slowly learning Arabic. I’ve got some of the basics down. Hausa is interesting too.

Niger-Congo because I speak a Gur language. I am interested in Bambara too.

Turkic because I’d like to go to Turkiye one day and should probably learn some Turkish first.

Isolate because I’d like to learn Japanese.

5

I picked the three (IE, AA, Austronesian) I’m most familiar/least unfamiliar with personally: so boring. Actually, I would like to switch my vote to include Dravidian, plz.

6

I picked Khoisan, Mayan and Isolates, because I love the sounds of individual languages in those 3 groups.

8

I picked Indo-European (all the languages I am competent in), Turkic (just interesting to me), Austronesian (mostly interested in Polynesian languages), and Other for Yuman, as I’ve studied Kumeyaay, the indigenous language of San Diego.

9

I chose indo-european as I have some passing comprehension of a lot of basic Latin and Greek words, from all my years in medicine. Also a few years of French in HS and college.

Next, I chose Uralic, as the fact that Finnish and Hungarian are related always interested me.

Isolates was my 3rd choice, as Basque and Korean fascinated me due to their uniqueness.

10

Uralic is what inspired this thread and I’ve spent years reading up on everything I can find about it. When I went to a used book store and found a copy of Finno-Ugrian Languages and Peoples by Peter Hajdu, it was a braingasm. Even though it’s outdated, it’s still an essential introduction to the subject. Though if asked I would recommend The Uralic Languages from Routledge and anything by Denis Sinor.

I had to go with Afroasiatic because of my work in Arabic and Hebrew. Matching Semitic triliteral roots with Egyptian biliteral roots is always fun.

Algonquian, because I’ve been learning the Unami Lenape language, and Proto-Algonquian reconstruction is pretty well underway. It’s a very old, widespread, and storied language family of America. Speakers of Eastern Algonquian languages up and down the eastern seaboard called the Lenni Lenape the “grandfathers,” and Eastern Algonquian forms the only taxonomically valid genetic subgroup of the family.

I put Turkic but I really meant Altaic, which is of a piece with my love for Uralic. Do not tell me Altaic isn’t real. The languages that have been labeled Altaic are real languages, after all, and I love them a lot, however you classify them.

Dravidian, because of my exposure to South India and also contact with Tamil when I lived in Malaysia. If this hadn’t been cut off at five, I would have put Austronesian too, speaking of Malay. I certainly geek Indo-European to the max, but I wanted to give time to less huge and equally interesting families.

11

Here are the ones that I’ve picked :

1. Iroquoian
It’s one of the first North American language families that European explorers came across, and as a result, it is one of the relatively few for which we have data going back several centuries, allowing some research into their historical development. Like many native American languages, it’s polysynthetic, building huge “sentence-words” by stacking morphemes on a single root. It’s also well-known for its unusual lack of labial consonants (p, b, f, v, m), something that was noted early on with some bewilderment by colonists.

2. Algonquian
Like Iroquoian, it’s one of the first North American language families that Europeans encountered, written records date back to at least the 17th century and it’s polysythetic too. It’s one of the best known, most studied and most firmly established New World language families. Its geographic extent is impressive, straddling the US-Canada border from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.

3. Austronesian
One of the biggest language families in the world, its geographic spread is mind-boggling, a gigantic triangle linking Madagascar, Hawaii and New Zealand, encompassing Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and most of Oceania. In spite of the huge distances involved, and millenia elapsed, many core cognates are still easily identifiable nowadays even to the layman. As a matter of fact, the ressemblances were already noticed several centuries ago by sailors and explorers and consequently, it’s one of the language families that was first recognized, even before Indo-European. Plus, the basic vocabulary looks and sounds cool in many languages.

4. Uralic
It was the first non-Indo-European language family that caught my interest when I started studying linguistics. I spent many hours at the University library reading the Routledge The Uralic Languages book that Johanna referenced. I know only rudimentary Finnish and my interest has somewhat waned in the past 30 years, but I still love these agglutinative, eerily melodious languages.

5. Dené–Yeniseian
Compared with the other 4 families, this is the one that I know the least about. But it deserves to be here as the first and so far only language family that links Siberia and North America. The original paper presented by Vajda in 2008 caused quite a stir because of that, but it was mainly well-received. Since then, evidence has accumulated in favour of the validity of the kinship and, while the jury is still out, things look very promising from what I understand.

Actually, Dené–Yeniseian was a last-second pick. I was about to choose Indo-European when I realized that I’m now only moderately interested in this extremely well-known and extensively described family. I geek the more exotic ones nowadays…

12

Dené–Yeniseian and Uto-Aztecan for the way they show prehistoric migration. You have Uto-Aztecan being all up in the Rockies and adjacent plains, then in central Mexico. And Tlingit way up in the Yukon and in the southwest. The Aztec at least had a tradition of having come down from somewhere up north, but as far as I have been able to find out the Navajo and Apache have a tradition of having always lived where they are now (at least since the emergence of humans into this world).

And Isolates partially because I speak Japanese, but also for their having resisted the countless waves of conquest and assimilation that created all of these huge language families.

13

Dené-Yeniseian is a truly exciting breakthrough. In linguistics it’s the equivalent of discovering life on another planet. I’m currently on my second go at learning Navajo. It’s the only American Indian language taught by Duolingo, so how would I not take advantage of the opportunity? It has the biggest speaking population of all Indian languages north of the US–Mexico border.

My first attempt was 30 years ago with a book called Navajo Made Easier. Note the carefully chosen title. Nobody could ever make Navajo easy. Its whole basis for grammar and vocabulary is like something from another planet compared to every other language in the world I’ve looked at. Its complexity is in a league all its own. Grammatical structures in Algonquian languages like Cree* or Lenape are not so strange to speakers of European or Semitic languages, relatively. But Navajo is something else. The book The Navajo Language by Young and Morgan is bigger and heavier than a paving stone; there are no regular verb paradigms and each verb is conjugated differently from the others.
*Cree has the highest number of speakers in Canada. Buffy Sainte-Marie belongs to the Cree nation. She sings “Ke Sakihitin Awasis” in Cree.

14

My first exposure to the Navajo language was in 1973 hearing “Nihaa Shił Hózhǫ́ (I Am Happy About You)” by XIT on the radio. Love at first listen.

Nihaa = for you, shił = with me, hózhǫ́ = it is beautiful = ‘I am happy about you’.

15

As for the Yeniseian side, there was (is?) a series of lessons in the Ket language on Youtube taught by an endearingly nerdy American who bills himself as the Brofessor. But he’s better than that unfortunate sobriquet would suggest.

16

Indo European, for the win. Uto-Aztecan gets second place for effort.

17

Can I choose Quentic?