  Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over
language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a
simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real
languages. The model bases on the recent findings that language changes occur
independently on the population size. We find agreement with the data
additionally assuming that languages may be distinguished by having at least
one among a finite, small number of different features. This finite set is used
also in order to define the distance between two languages, similarly to
linguistics tradition since Swadesh.
