Genus (linguistics)

In linguistics, a genus is a group of phylogenetically related languages inside a linguistic family, in particular a genus is a group languages which can be recognized as related languages without using complex methods of historical linguistics. The notion of genus was proposed by M. Dryer.,^[1] and is used commonly in some academic projects such as: WALS.^[2] According to WALS most families can be subdivided in a certain number of genus, so the notion is similar to the term subfamily.

Introduction

Language Families

Since 18th century, linguists have classified languages according to phylogenetic criteria. Before 18th century, the common origins of Germanic languages or Slavic languages had been recognized. Many authors hypothesized that each of these language groups derived from a common "mother language" (in a similiar way in which Romance languages derive historically from Latin). The phylologists of 19th century called a group of related languages a "family of sister languages" (generalizing the genealogical metaphor). When a "mother language" is undocumented, but can be partially reconstructed from the "sister languages", one refers to this language as a proto-language.

With the development of comparative linguistics and the establishment of historical linguistics as a scientific discipline, more "language families" were recognized, and more proto-languages were proposed.

Lack of comparability

There are some problems when one tries to compare language families. Some families are huge, and its proto-language was spoken six or seven millennia ago, but other families are tiny and its ancestor language seems to be spoken more recently. Indeed, the establishment of an accepted language family depends on the quality of the documentation and the amount of comparative work in each group of languages. Obviously, the languages of Europe were much well known in the 19th century, and the Indo-European language family was well established early. For the remain of the world languages, in the 19th century only a few language families were identified, often in a incomplete manner (Bantu languages and Malayo-Polynesian languages were recognized as groups of related languages, but not Niger-Congo languages or Austronesian languages).

Genera

On the other hand, all the genera are internally much more homogeneous than language families. In addition, most language genera seem to involve more or less the same time depth. For these reason, genera are much more suitable for typological comparison than language families.

References

1. Dryer, 1989.
2. Genealogical Language List (WALS)

Bibliography

• Dryer, Matthew S. 1989. "Large linguistic areas and language sampling". Studies in Language 13, pp. 257–292.