Language Tree – Old World Language Families

Language is always evolving. Certainly our ancestors couldn’t have anticipated the word “selfie,” after all, and many folks would have a hard time deciphering the story of Beowulf in its original form. This infographic beautifully illustrates the evolution of linguistics from old-world language families to their present-day incarnations. It depicts the languages in the form of trees, one of which is very large, while the other is quite small. One tree’s trunk represents the old-world language family of Indo-European, from which hundreds of other languages branch off. The smaller tree’s trunk represents Uralic, the old-world language from which a select few languages, like Finnish and Khanty, eventually branch out.