 | Figure 5
Nature Genetics
33, 266 - 275 (2003)
doi:10.1038/ng1113
The application of molecular genetic approaches to the study of human evolutionL. Luca Cavalli-Sforza
& Marcus W. Feldman | | | | Figure 5. Language families of the world.
The 12 families of the Greenberg classification88,
122,
123,
124,
125. The Eurasiatic superfamily includes six families (most of which are recognized by most linguists) and an isolate, Gilyak, listed in the central column. The oldest family is the Khoisan that includes Bushmen and Hottentots, many of whom also belong genetically to the oldest haplogroups of both mtDNA and NRY. Australian and Indopacific are also old families. Other African languages are Niger-Kordofanian (mostly west Africa), Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic (that includes Semitic languages like Arab and Hebrew). American languages belong to three families: Amerinds were the first to migrate from Asia, according to some (Fagan, ref. 89) as late as 15 kya, and Amerind shows affinities with Eurasiatic. One of the other two American families is Na-Dene (belonging to Dene-Caucasian), a family that probably spread to Eurasia before Eurasiatic and includes Sinotibetan, spoken in almost all of China, as well as some isolated, probably relic, languages (Basque, a few Caucasian languages and Burushaski, spoken in N. Pakistan) that all survived the later spread of Eurasiatic languages. The third American family is Eskimo-Aleut, the last to spread to America from N.E. Siberia. The Austric family is very large and is spoken in S.E. Asia, Indonesia, all of Polynesia to the east and Madagascar to the west.
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