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Language Families
Languages change in time and the same language can have a different if people speaking the same language are separated.
If people have contacts, the divergence will be small and they will still be able to understand each other; this is how different dialects are created.
If the two peoples are far from each other, the dialcts that were born at first, will continue to diverge and, after a few hundred years, become two different languages.
Two daughter languages born from a common parent languages are called related, their common ancestor is called protolanguage.
There are about 4000 different languages in the world and many of them are related and belong to a particular group. These groups of related languages are called language families[F1] [S1] [I1] [I2] [E1]
Examples of language families are the Semitic group, the Uralic [E1] [I1], the Altaic [E1] [I1], the Sino-tibetan (which has a huge number of speakers)[E1] [I1] and the Indoeuropean[E1].
Languages which were born from these parent languages can in turn give birth to other languages, thus creating a complex family tree with many different branches.
This process can be exmplified by Latin, which, when the Roman Empire collapsed, underwent a process of divergence which originated Romance languages[E1].
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