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The languages Hindi and Farsi are distant relations to Swedish. True or false
Nǐhǎo Selma! Have you ever thought about how language can differ so much from country to country? And yet sometimes seem so similar? How can this be? Well, some languages have developed from one and the same original language -- they are related to each other -- while others belong to completely different families.
In the world there are several thousand languages spoken. These languages belongs to different families. It's efficient to draw language-family-trees to show how these families are related. You might have seen a family tree showing your own family. It shows how you are related to your family and ancestors.
It's possible to show the languages spoken today and their ancestors in the same way. There is about one hundred different language family trees. They each show a language family not related to the other families. This huge tree is the ino-tibetan language tree. One of its branches is Mandarin.
Mandarin is mostly spoken in China and it's the language most spoken in the world. - Nǐhǎo means hello in Mandarin. - Hi! On this tree there are two hundred and fifty branches showing different languages spoken in East Asia. This is the Afro-Asian language tree. Its branches show languages spoken in Southwest Asia and eastern Africa. It has three hundred and fifty branches.
The largest language in this family is Arabic. On this tree there are also languages like Tigrinya Somali and Assyrian. But where do all words come from? We talk very differently in different countries but still a lot of the words look similar. The words for father and mother mommy and daddy - look almost the same in a lot of languages.
But that is actually not as strange as it might seem. Most languages spoken in Europe are related to each other. Like siblings or cousins. This is the Indo-European family language tree. The ancestor of the Swedish, German and English languages - and more - was spoken by a people during the Stone Age.
They lived here, in an area north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Eventually, this group of people moved and spread in different directions, taking their language. As time passed and they moved further away the words and the pronunciation changed more and more. Their original language developed, first into dialects, and then into several languages. The Indo-european language tree became larger and larger and new branches grew out of its trunk.
The indo-iranian branch turned into languages like Farsi, Kurdish, Hindi, and Dari. The romance branch turned into for example Spanish, French, and Italian. The Slavic branch turned into languages like Russian, Polish and Croatian. The Germanic branch split into West Germanic languages like German, English, and Dutch and North Germanic languages like Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. So the Swedish language has a lot of relatives.
Norwegian and Danish are like its siblings. English and German are a bit more like cousins while Spanish and French are like second cousins. But even Hindi and Farsi are distant relations to Swedish. They share the same ancestor. Languages spoken in countries close to each other don't have to be related.
Here, in the middle of the Indo-European languages are Finnish, Sami, Estonian and Hungarian spoken. They are not Indo-European but Finno-Ugric from the Uralic tree. So even though this tree grows close to the Indo-european tree these families are not interrelated.