Do All Languages Have the Same

Do all languages have the same source ? What does it imply when two languages are said to be relat-ed? Are all languages connected? 

    Have you studied German, Spanish, or French before? If you had, you were most likely thankful for cognates, which are foreign words that sound and look like English terms with similar mean-ings. In German, your parents are known as your Mutter and Vater. They are known as your madre and padre in Spanish. They are known as your mère and père in French. 

    These similarities not only make language acquisition simpler but also provide information about the history of languages. Because they are both descended from a language called Proto-West-Germanic, which was spoken by tribes in northern Europe over two thousand years ago, English and German share some terminol-ogy. Migrations broke that lan-guage into dialects, and some tribes crossed the North Sea into the British Isles. The British Isles developed variations of English, while the Mainlanders developed German over 15 centuries. Thus, we have two languages that are clearly distinct yet also related. 
Language families, like human families, can expand geographical-ly and chronologically. The Ro-mance family, which contains French, Spanish, and numerous other languages with Latin as their common ancestor, is a cousin of the Germanic family, which in-cludes English, German, and oth-ers. Now let's go back even further. Germanic and Romance share Pro-to-Indo-European. Six- to seven-thousand-year-old tribes on the steppes north and east of the Black Sea spoke it. The tribes moved west over Europe, east into Iran, and south into northern India. Their language evolved into Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Indian, and Iranian languages as they ex-panded and lost contact. The Indo-European language family is the most spoken in the world.

 Can all language families be linked in a superfamily tree that begins with a single ancestral language??

 Linguists are studying and com-paring non-Indo-European lan-guages to determine their families. Can their families be traced back?
Many non-Indo-European lan-guages are similar.

Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, which are surrounded by Indo-Europeans in central Europe, are not Indo-European languages. However, they belong to the Uralic language family. Turkic includes Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Ui-ghur, Kazakh, and other Central Asian languages. Mandarin Chi-nese is the biggest of approximate-ly 250 Sino-Tibetan languages in East Asia. Linguists believe at least 200 language families exist. Are any of them related?

Theorists believe we can group all languages—even Basque, which appears to belong nowhere—into a few prominent families. 

    But perhaps we can't go that far. The fact that the word for 'dog' in Mbabaram, an Australian abo-riginal language, is 'dog' does not imply that Mbabaram is connected to English; it is only a coincidental resemblance. Chinese people call coffee kāfēi, which is a Turkish word acquired by both Chinese and English. We also know that languages constantly evolve, add-ing new words and removing old ones, including cognates. Gram-mar has changed too. Can we lo-cate a common ancestor after tens of thousands of years of evolution? All languages from the same source? The correct response is "maybe" and "maybe not." To say anything definitive at this point would be premature.