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Concept
Genetic relationship (linguistics)
Summary
Two languages have a genetic relationship, and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change, or one is descended from the other.
The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship.
An example of linguistic genetic relationship would be between the Romance languages, such as Spanish, French, and Romanian, all descended from the spoken Latin of ancient Rome.
Language relationships can inform to some extent about possible genetic relationships in the biological sense. For example, if all languages stem from a single origin, it strongly implies that all humanity may have been collected together at some point in history. However, counterexamples exist, such as in the case of adoption and intermixing of specific languages.
Comparative method
In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family, wherein Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for the North Germanic language family, including Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic, which have shared descent from Ancient Norse. Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants.
In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance, the Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives.
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