example. Depending on which country you are in, you might declare your feelings in one of the following ways: ‘Ti amo’, ‘Amote’, ‘T’aimi’ or ‘Je t’aime’. In Latin it would be ‘Te amo’ – exactly like modern Spanish.
To swear your love to someone in Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda you could say, in Swahili, ‘Nakupenda’. A bit further south, in Mozambique, Zambia, or Malawi where I was brought up, you might say, in the Chinyanja language, ‘Ndimakukonda’. In other so-called Bantu languages in southern Africa you might say ‘Ndinokuda’, ‘Ndiyakuthanda’ or, to a Zulu, ‘Ngiyakuthanda’. This Bantu family of languages is quite distinct from the Romance family of languages, and both are distinct from the Germanic family which includes Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. See how we use the word ‘family’ for languages, just as we do for species (the cat family, the dog family) and also, of course, for our own families (the Jones family, the Robinson family, the Dawkins family).
It isn’t hard to work out how families of related languages arise over the centuries. Listen to the way you and your friends speak to each other, and compare it to the way your grandparents speak. Their speech is only slightly different and you can easily understand them, but they are only two generations away. Now imagine talking, not to your grandparents but to your 25-greats-grandparents. If you happen to be English, that might take you back to the late fourteenth century – the lifetime of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote descriptions like this:
He was a lord ful fat and in good poynt
;
His eyen stepe, and rollynge in his heed
,
That stemed as a forneys of a leed
;
His bootes souple, his hors in greet estaat
.
Now certeinly he was a fair prelaat
;
He was nat pale as a forpyned goost
.
A fat swan loved he best of any roost
.
His palfrey was as broun as is a berye
.
Well, it is recognizably English, isn’t it? But I bet you’d have a hard time understanding it if you heard it spoken. And if it was any more different you’d probably consider it a separate language, as different as Spanish is from Italian.
So, the language in any one place changes century by century. We could say it ‘drifts’ into something different. Now add the fact that people speaking the same language in different places don’t often have the opportunity to hear each other (or at least they didn’t before telephones and radios were invented); and the fact that language drifts in different directions in different places. This applies to the way it is spoken as well as to the words themselves: think how different English sounds in a Scottish, Welsh, Geordie, Cornish, Australian or American accent. And Scottish people can easily distinguish an Edinburgh accent from a Glasgow accent or a Hebridean accent. Over time, both the way the language is spoken and the words used become characteristic of a region; when two ways of speaking a language have drifted sufficiently far apart, we call them different ‘dialects’.
After enough centuries of drift, different regional dialects eventually become so different that people in one region can no longer understand people in another. At this point we call them separate languages. That is what happened when German and Dutch drifted, in separate directions, from a now extinct ancestral language. It is what happened when French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese independently drifted away from Latin in separate parts of Europe. You can draw a family tree of languages, with ‘cousins’ like French, Portuguese and Italian on neighbouring ‘branches’ and ancestors like Latin further down the tree – just as Darwin did with species.
Like languages, species change over time and over distance. Before we look at
why
this happens, we need to see
how
they do it. For species, the equivalent of words is DNA – the genetic information every living thing carries inside it that determines
To swear your love to someone in Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda you could say, in Swahili, ‘Nakupenda’. A bit further south, in Mozambique, Zambia, or Malawi where I was brought up, you might say, in the Chinyanja language, ‘Ndimakukonda’. In other so-called Bantu languages in southern Africa you might say ‘Ndinokuda’, ‘Ndiyakuthanda’ or, to a Zulu, ‘Ngiyakuthanda’. This Bantu family of languages is quite distinct from the Romance family of languages, and both are distinct from the Germanic family which includes Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. See how we use the word ‘family’ for languages, just as we do for species (the cat family, the dog family) and also, of course, for our own families (the Jones family, the Robinson family, the Dawkins family).
It isn’t hard to work out how families of related languages arise over the centuries. Listen to the way you and your friends speak to each other, and compare it to the way your grandparents speak. Their speech is only slightly different and you can easily understand them, but they are only two generations away. Now imagine talking, not to your grandparents but to your 25-greats-grandparents. If you happen to be English, that might take you back to the late fourteenth century – the lifetime of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote descriptions like this:
He was a lord ful fat and in good poynt
;
His eyen stepe, and rollynge in his heed
,
That stemed as a forneys of a leed
;
His bootes souple, his hors in greet estaat
.
Now certeinly he was a fair prelaat
;
He was nat pale as a forpyned goost
.
A fat swan loved he best of any roost
.
His palfrey was as broun as is a berye
.
Well, it is recognizably English, isn’t it? But I bet you’d have a hard time understanding it if you heard it spoken. And if it was any more different you’d probably consider it a separate language, as different as Spanish is from Italian.
So, the language in any one place changes century by century. We could say it ‘drifts’ into something different. Now add the fact that people speaking the same language in different places don’t often have the opportunity to hear each other (or at least they didn’t before telephones and radios were invented); and the fact that language drifts in different directions in different places. This applies to the way it is spoken as well as to the words themselves: think how different English sounds in a Scottish, Welsh, Geordie, Cornish, Australian or American accent. And Scottish people can easily distinguish an Edinburgh accent from a Glasgow accent or a Hebridean accent. Over time, both the way the language is spoken and the words used become characteristic of a region; when two ways of speaking a language have drifted sufficiently far apart, we call them different ‘dialects’.
After enough centuries of drift, different regional dialects eventually become so different that people in one region can no longer understand people in another. At this point we call them separate languages. That is what happened when German and Dutch drifted, in separate directions, from a now extinct ancestral language. It is what happened when French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese independently drifted away from Latin in separate parts of Europe. You can draw a family tree of languages, with ‘cousins’ like French, Portuguese and Italian on neighbouring ‘branches’ and ancestors like Latin further down the tree – just as Darwin did with species.
Like languages, species change over time and over distance. Before we look at
why
this happens, we need to see
how
they do it. For species, the equivalent of words is DNA – the genetic information every living thing carries inside it that determines
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