I present here a scheme for the classification of
I have excluded:
- "contact" languages (pidgins and creoles), as
their classification requires a different kind of logic;
- artificial languages, whether meant as an "easy" way
for communication (e.g. Esperanto), or used for public (e.g. Klingon) or
private (e.g. my own Tundrian) entertainment.
The classification of languages, like that of living
things, is a complex, and rather arbitrary, matter.
Just as in the case of biological classification, the
classification of languages relies heavily on the idea of common descent.
Languages that are thought to derive from a common ancestor are placed together
in a set that may be called a language branch, family, or phylum, depending on the
degree of commonality.
There is a problem with this, however. Usually,
classification serves a purpose: cataloguing books and/or articles, listing
Internet pages, etc. Without some classification scheme, it becomes impossible
to have an overview of a complex set of data.
Now, if we follow a strictly genetic classification in a
practical scheme, we can easily contradict this other purpose of the
classification exercise: simplicity.
Let us use an example, that of the Austronesian
languages. If we stick to a strictly hierarchical, descent-based approach, we
would need two steps to categorize the rather obscure Formosan language Tsou:
Austronesian > Tsouic > Tsou
On the other hand, we would need eight steps to get to
Maori, one of the national languages of New Zealand:
Austronesian > Malayo-Polynesian > Central-Eastern
Malayo-Polynesian > Eastern Malayo-Polynesian > Oceanic > Remote Oceanic >
Central Pacific > Polynesian > Maori
(See Ruhlen (1991:296-297) in the
The classification I propose to establish here shuffles
subcategories in some cases in order to even out the number of steps needed to
locate a particular language. As a result, this classification scheme, without
being unscientific, becomes usable for any practical cataloguing scheme.
As an example, the classifications of the two languages
used in the example above become:
Austronesian > Formosan > Tsou
Austronesian > Oceanic > Maori
CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD