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In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. [1]
Below is a partial list of proto-languages that have been reconstructed, ordered by geographic location. Africa. Proto-Afroasiatic. Proto-Semitic; Proto-Cushitic;
A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically-attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related. Depending on the age of the language family under consideration, its homeland may be known with near-certainty (in the case of historical or near-historical migrations) or it may be very uncertain (in the case of ...
The Proto-Human language, also known as Proto-Sapiens or Proto-World, is the hypothetical direct genetic predecessor of all human languages. [ 1 ] The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in historical linguistics .
The validity of Amazonia as a linguistic area has been called into question by recent research, including quantitative studies. A study of argument marking parameters in 74 South American languages by Joshua Birchall found that “not a single feature showed an areal distribution for Amazonia as a macroregion.
Once a trade pidgin and the most far-reaching sign language in North America, Plains Sign Talk or Plains Sign Language is now critically endangered with an unknown number of speakers. Navajo Sign Language has been found to be in use in one clan of Navajo ; however, whether it is a dialect of Plains Sign Talk or a separate language remains unknown.
Pre-contact distribution of Iroquoian languages. The Iroquoian peoples are an ethnolinguistic group of peoples from eastern North America.Their traditional territories, often referred to by scholars as Iroquoia, [1] stretch from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in the north, to modern-day North Carolina in the south.
In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, [1] particularly when such features are not descended from a common ancestor or proto-language. An areal feature is contrasted with genetic relationship determined similarity within the same language family .