Genetic relationship

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Genetic relationship, in linguistics is the relationship which exists among languages as a result of being members of the same language family or language group--that is, either being derived from, or acting as ancestor of, each other. Contact, by definition, does not lead to a genetic relationship.

The discipline of historical linguistics rests on the notion that almost all languages spoken in the world today can be grouped by derivation from common ancestral languages into a relatively small number of families. For example, English is related to other Indo-European languages, and more specifically, to the Germanic and West Germanic groups and sub-groups, respectively, or that Mandarin is related to many other Sino-Tibetan languages.