In the history of human languages, what are superfamilies?

Question

Thanks for any help guys,

-Chaser

Answer 1

"Superfamilies" are the largest known linguistic families to which languages belong. For example, Welsh, English, Dutch, Russian and Persian all belong to the "Indo-European superfamily." However, they all belong to different "branches" of this Indo-European superfamily too: Celtic for Welsh, Germanic for Dutch and English, Slavic for Russian and Indo-Iranian for Persian.

Another well-known superfamily is "Hamito-Semitic." It includes languages like Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia) and the extinct Phoenecian, Syrian and Babylonian languages, some of which are mentioned in the Bible.

Still, a third well-known superfamily is the Sino-Tibetan which includes Chinese, Burmese and Tibetan in Asia.

If the globalists are correct, there are still language groups even larger than a superfamily called a "macro-family." One proposed macro-family is "Nostratic or Eurasiatic". It includes the Indo-European and Semitic superfamilies, as well as the Ural-Altaic, Chuckchi-Eskimo and Japanese -Korean superfamilies. Some others are "Dene-Caucasian," which includes languages as far apart as Basque, Chinese and Navajo and "Amerindian" which includes about 2/3 of the North American Indian languages and most of the South American Indian languages.

The globalists believe that all of the world's languages ultimately descend from an ancestral human language spoken somewhere in Africa about 35,000 years ago.

So, a language like English would break down as:

Subfamily (or Branch): Germanic (or Teutonic)
Superfamily: Indo-European (Aryan - an older term).
Macro-family: Nostratic (still theoretical, however).