The Origin of Languages and Language Trees

By Joseph Kezele, M.D., 



In the last issue, we discussed how migration and isolation of people after the dispersion from Babel led to the development of people groups and superficial variations in their physical characteristics. This was brought about by God’s judgment of their disobedience by not spreading out to fill the Earth. He gave them different languages, probably by family groups, so that they would be frustrated with their inability to communicate, and separate from all the other groups.

In this way God forced people to spread out and fill the Earth. As people groups spread out and multiplied, those groups became isolated from each other. This occurred not only in terms of geography, but also in terms of genetics, as discussed in the last issue, and in terms of their languages as well, to the degree that subgroups of languages developed markedly distinct characteristics from each other.

Linguists study characteristics such as root words in vocabulary, the use of prefixes and suffixes, vowel shifts, word order—also called syntax—and changes in verb forms, called conjugation.

Changes in noun and adjective endings, called declensions, and how they are used, called cases, are analyzed as well. Each case is for a different use of a noun in a sentence. For example, one case, the nominative, is the subject of a sentence. Another case is the accusative, used for the recipient of the action of the verb. In English we call this the direct object.

All of these characteristics and others are analyzed and compared, then used to classify languages into families, groups and subgroups.

To give you an idea of the degree to which this happened, let’s take a look at just one of hundreds of families of languages, the Indo-European Family of languages. It has about 125 members, some extinct, many still spoken today. They are classified into 12 groups:

1. Paleo-Balkan, Armenian and other languages
2. Anatolian
3. Baltic
4. Celtic
5. Dardic & Nuristani
6. Germanic
7. Indic
8. Iranian
9. Italic
10. Romance
11. Slavic and
12. Tocharian.


Let’s look at just one group, the Germanic languages. They are placed into the following subgroups: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, German, Icelandic, Low Saxon, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish, Faroese, Scotts (not Scottish) and English.

Studies of all of these languages show that they developed from one ancestral language, called Proto Indo-European, which means the first Indo-European language. It has been reconstructed by combining the characteristics of its members. For example, modern members of the Indo-European family of languages that still use cases (defined above) to a significant degree have anywhere from 4 (German), 6 (Russian) or 7 (Czech and Latin). Combining all of these cases, there are actually a total of eight different cases. So Proto Indo-European is said to have had eight cases.

Proto Indo-European is only one of 344 classified families of languages, 282 of which are still spoken, and 62 which are extinct. There are several hundred unclassified language families that the experts have no idea what to do with, because their characteristics are so different. Within all these families, there are some 6,800 languages still spoken today.

The linguists, who think in evolutionary terms, have made multiple attempts to tie the language families into one all-inclusive tree of languages. They have been met with total failure.

This point resembles is completely consistent with the biblical account of many different orchards of unrelated language trees, caused supernaturally by God at Babel.

In the next issue we will take a look at some specific features of languages to demonstrate how they have changed in precisely the opposite direction from what the evolutionary model calls for.