Proto-language

A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is a language – usually hypothetical or reconstructed, and unattested – from which a number of attested, or documented, known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, or slow modification of the proto-language into languages that form a language family.

In the strict sense, a proto-language is the latest common ancestor of a language family (immediately before the start of the divergence into the attested idioms) and thus corresponds to the most recent common ancestor in biology, although the term is often used more loosely. Moreover, a group of idioms (such as a dialect cluster) which are not considered separate languages (for whichever reasons) can also be described as descending from a unitary proto-language.

Occasionally, the German term Ursprache (from Ur- "primordial" and Sprache "language", pronounced [ˈʔuːɐ.ʃpʁaː.xə]) is used instead.

Definition and verification

Typically, the proto-language is not known directly. It is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics. The tree is a statement of similarity and a hypothesis that the similarity results from descent from a common language.

Proto-language (disambiguation)

A proto-language is a hypothetical or reconstructed language from which a number of known languages are believed to have descended in historical linguistics.

Proto-language may also refer to:

See also