Language Family Values Trivia Quiz

Answer: Germanic

You might think Celtic, but English is actually a Germanic language. Anglo-Saxon, its linguistic grandfather, was a mixture of dialects spoken by various West Germanic tribes such as the Jutes, Frisians, Angles and Saxons, and also shared similarities with the Old Norse spoken by Viking invaders. It is part of the West Germanic group, along with German, Dutch (which actually gets its name from 'Deutsch', the German word for the German language) and Afrikaans. The North Germanic group, meanwhile, contains Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian, amongst others. There is also an East Germanic group, albeit one with extinct languages such as Gothic, which were spoken by various tribes from what is present-day Scandinavia, Germany and the Benelux countries.

Compare the words for 'bread': 'Brot' in German, 'Brød' in Norwegian and Danish, and 'Brood' in Dutch.

Answer: Estonian

Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish are among the very few European languages that are not part of the Indo-European family. They all belong to the Finno-Ugric group, a subgroup of the Uralic family of languages, which also includes the languages of the Samoyedic and Sami peoples. The Uralic family gets its name from the Ural Mountains in Russia and Kazakhstan, where its linguistic ancestor, Proto-Uralic, is supposed to have originated. The Magyars, from whom modern-day Hungarians are descended, and the Finns both lived west of the Urals, but while the Magyars migrated to Siberia and then southward to the Danube region, the Finns moved further north and divided into groups, one settling in the region that was to become Estonia, the other settling in what was to become Finland. Hence, although both groups originated from the same area, the gap between them grew more distant.

Although Finnish and Estonian, as part of the Finnic group, are more closely related to each other than to Hungarian, an Ugric language, there are some similarities. For instance, Finnish and Hungarian are agglutinative languages (i.e. they form words by 'gluing' morphemes together), make use of prefixes, possessive suffixes and postpositions (which can lead to some really long words!), have a large amount of terms in common relating to hunting, building and animals, and tend to stress the first syllable of a word.

Compare the words for 'fish': 'halak' in Hungarian, 'kala' in Finnish and 'kalad' in Estonian.

Answer: Niger-Congo

Of the African language families, Niger-Congo is the largest; approximately 75%-85% of Africans speak Niger-Congo languages. Although trying to classify them is difficult due to lack of historical records one theory about this family of languages is that they originated in western Africa, before spreading southwards and eastwards due to migration. Niger-Congo languages are divided into two subgroups, one of which is the Bantu subgroup, which consists of languages spoken in East, Central and Southern Africa. All but two (English and Afrikaans) of South Africa's eleven official languages are Bantu languages, including Xhosa. One of Xhosa's most notable characteristics is the use of click consonants, a characteristic also shared with Zulu and Ndebele.

Although there are loads of languages (at least 1400!) in the Niger-Congo family, and trying to classify them is difficult due to lack of historical records, they do have aspects in common. They are mainly tonal (i.e. meaning of a word can change, depending on the pitch at which it is pronounced), with pre-nasalised vowels. Like the Finno-Ugric languages, they are agglutinative and use prefixes and suffixes as qualifiers for verbs, indicating tense, mood, person etc.

Compare the words for 'dog': 'inja' (Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu), 'aja' in Yoruba and 'imbwa' in Shona.

Answer: Yes

Yes, Urdu, Hindi, Persian and Pashto are all from the same subgroup - they're Indo-Iranian languages. Persian and Pashto belong to the Iranian subgroup, while Urdu and Hindi belong to the Indo-Aryan subgroup. Persian and Hindustani are pluricentric languages, in that they have different standardised forms; Modern Standard Urdu and Hindi in the case of Hindustani, while Tajik and Dari are standardised forms of Persian, spoken in Tajikistan and Afghanistan respectively. The Urdu, Pashto and Persian alphabets are both based on Arabic script and read right-to-left, while the Hindi alphabet uses the Devanagari alphabet and is read left-to-right.

Although Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language rather than an Iranian one, it is heavily influenced by Persian, due to the conquest of South Asia by the Ghaznavids, a Central Asian Muslim dynasty, and the mingling of Persian, Arabic and Turkic loan words with the Khariboli dialect.

Compare the words for 'home': 'kor' in Pashto, 'ghar' in Urdu. Also compare the words for 'blue': 'niilii' in Persian and 'neela' in Urdu.

Answer: Semitic

Of all the official languages of the European Union, Maltese is notable for being the only Semitic one. Its ancestor, Siculo-Arabic, was a variety of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta during the Byzantine age, after the invasion of the Fatimids from Tunisia. Although it eventually died out in Sicily, it remained in Malta, picking up influences from other languages along the way, such as French (see the word for railway 'xemindifer', which is similar to the French 'chemin de fer'), Italian (such as 'grazzi' for 'thank you'), and English. Unlike other Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, it uses the Latin alphabet and is read from left to right.

The most notable feature of Semitic languages is the triliteral verb root - in other words, verb roots composed of a trio of consonants, such as the Hebrew verb root l-m-d (lamed, mem, dalet), which means 'to teach / learn'.

Compare the words for 'dog': 'kelev' in Hebrew, 'kelb' in Maltese, and 'kalb' in Arabic.

Answer: West Slavic

The three main groups for Slavic languages are East, South and West Slavic, though North Slavic has been proposed as an alternative group containing both the East and West Slavic languages. Polish, like Czech and Slovak, is a West Slavic language, while the South Slavic group includes Bulgarian and the languages of the former Yugoslavia (Serbian, Slovene etc.), and the East Slavic group includes Russian and Ukrainian. Unlike East Slavic languages, and some South Slavic languages such as Bulgarian, the West Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic one. A common feature of the West Slavic languages is the use of up to seven cases for nouns and adjectives - nominative, genitive, and so on - and no definite articles. Like German, they have three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.

Religion played a part in the divisions between the Slavic languages, during the Christianisation of the Slav peoples; Poland and Bohemia (situated in the modern day Czech Republic) became part of the Holy Roman Empire. Old Church Slavonic, a literary Church language written in the Cyrillic alphabet, remained in use in the Eastern Orthodox countries such as Russia, while falling out of use in the Catholic countries further west, such as Poland. Subsequently, it had far less influence on the West Slavic languages than on the South and East Slavic languages.

Compare the words for 'cat': 'kot' in Polish and Slovak, 'kocka' in Czech. Also compare the verb 'to give': 'davat' in Czech, 'dawac' in Polish.

Answer: Turkic

Turkmen and Turkish are part of the Southwestern or Oghuz subgroup of Turkic languages, named after the Oghuz tribes of medieval Central Asia. As well as Turkmen and Turkish, the Turkic family also includes the languages of several Central Asian countries, such as Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Azerbaijani and Kazakh, and the language of the Uyghur people. Turkic languages are thought to have originated among tribes living on the steppes of Central Asia, in the hypothetical Proto-Turkic region that also includes northern China and Inner Mongolia, and spread across central Asia into Europe and southwest Asia during the Turkic migration period of the early Middle Ages.

Like the Tungusic languages spoken in Siberia and Manchuria, Japanese, Mongolian and Chinese, Turkic languages are all part of the proposed Altaic family, which links languages spoken throughout Central and Northeastern Asia. Like the Slavic languages mentioned earlier, they have no definite article; nor do they have grammatical genders (e.g. the Turkish pronoun 'o' can mean 'he', 'she' or 'it'). They also make use of agglutination - there is one long word in Turkish, 'terbiyesizliklerindenmis', which means 'I gather that it was from their rudeness'! They make use of loan words from the language of neighbouring countries such as China, Iran or Mongolia.

Compare the words for 'black': 'qara' in Azerbaijani and Kazakh, 'qora' in Uzbek, 'gara' in Turkmen and 'kara' in Turkish.

Answer: Dravidian

The Dravidian language family is a predominantly Indian family, though Dravidian languages are spoken elsewhere in South Asia, such as Nepal and Pakistan. Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada are the most widely spoken. Although Dravidian languages are mainly spoken in the southern part of India - with the Indo-Aryan family having more of a presence further north - there are some theories that they were more populous in northern India, before the spread of Indo-Aryan languages, courtesy of invaders from Persia. The Dravidian family has barely any links to other language families, although it does share retroflex consonants with Indo-Aryan languages, probably due to them being spoken in the same areas.

Dravidian languages tend to be agglutinative, and make use of a feature called clusivity, where the meaning of 'we' varies depending on who is being included in it (for instance, in Telugu, 'manamu' is 'we' as in 'me and you', but 'memu' is 'we' as in 'me and him/her/them, but not you'). They also have a genderless form for the third person plural, used in formal situation; some, like Arabic, also divide nouns into 'rational' (humans - though not always with women - and gods) and 'irrational' (animals and objects). Different dialects of Dravidian languages may also vary according to the speaker's caste, location (for instance, there are ten regional varieties of Malayalam) or religion.

Compare the words for the number two: 'eradu' in Kannada, 'rendu' in Telugu, 'irandu' in Tamil, and 'randu' in Malayalam.

Answer: Celtic

The Celtic languages are the languages of the six 'Celtic nations': the Isle of Man, Brittany, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall. Breton, the language of Brittany, is the only Celtic language spoken outside the UK and Ireland. Breton, Welsh and Cornish all belong to the Brythonic subgroup of the Celtic group, and are descended from the language spoken by the indigenous Britons (as opposed to the imported Anglo-Saxon). Brythonic also spread to Brittany, or Armorica as it was then known, via emigration. (If you're an Asterix fan, this should ring some bells, as Armorica was the setting for Asterix's village.) Although Breton and Cornish are both considered endangered languages, and Breton has no status as an official language in France, there are revival movements and bilingual classes.

Most of the Celtic languages use a vigesimal counting system - in other words, a numerical system based on the number twenty. It's a similar principle to the French word 'quatre-vingts (four twenties)' for 'eighty'. Breton has 'daou-ugent' (two twenties)' for 'forty', and Scottish Gaelic has 'tri fichead (three twenties)' for 'sixty', for instance. They use verb-subject-object word order and have two grammatical genders.

Compare the words for 'book': 'llyfr' in Welsh, 'levr' in Breton, and 'leabhar' in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

Answer: Language isolates

Language isolates are languages which have no genealogical relationship with other languages, such as shared ancestors. Although there is a theory that the Basque language is part of a proposed 'Vasconic' family, which also includes the extinct Aquitanian, Basque is generally considered to be a language isolate. Other language isolates include Korean - the most widely spoken language isolate - Ainu, and Burushaski, a language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan. Japanese was considered to be a language isolate at one point, but is now considered as part of the Japonic family along with the Ryukyuan languages, which are not mutually intelligible with Japanese.

A language isolate can also be a language within a certain family with no links to any other languages in that family. For example, Albanian and Armenian are Indo-European languages, but do not belong to any subgroups such as Slavic or Indo-Aryan.