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Contents 1 Title 2 Scope 3 Parentage 4 Participants 5 Structure 6 Hierarchy Definition 7 Consensus Issues

[edit] Title

WikiProject Language families

[edit] Scope

This WikiProject aims primarily to provide a consistent treatment of each language family on the Wikipedia. Many language families already have extensive pages, and the systematic information on those pages is not presented in a consistent way. The purpose of this WikiProject is to present that information consistently, and to ensure that each of the major subject areas for each language family is covered at least briefly

[edit] Parentage

The parent of this WikiProject is the WikiProject Linguistics.

[edit] Participants

• nohat
• node ue
• The Great Gavini
• Dan Parvaz
• DThrax
• JWB (talk) 02:33, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
• Tyciol (talk) 18:25, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Structure

Minimally, each language family should have a list of daughter language families and/or languages, as well as the parent lineage up to the main language family.

There should also be discussion of the history of the language family, information both about what is known about the group that spoke the proto-language of the family as well as who first proposed the language family and what kind of history it has had within the field of historical linguistics.

[edit] Hierarchy Definition

Language families are parent nodes in a grand family forest of all languages (where a forest is a set of unrelated trees corresponding to the major language families, ie Indo-European, Austronesian, etc.

[edit] Consensus Issues

Care should be taken not to imply that all languages (or even all senses of languages being "related" to one another) can be handled via the family-tree model so successful with Indo-European. Some groups of languages are surprisingly resistant to such treatment, and some groupings (cf. "lumpers" vs. "splitters") are far from uncontroversial, such as the different taxonomies of Amerindian.