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Genealogical Classification of Language

There are two kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics: genetic (or genealogical) and typological. The purpose of genetic classification is to group languages into families according to their degree of diachronic relatedness. For example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies as Germanic or Celtic are recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on the other. So far, most of the languages of the world have been grouped only tentatively into families, and many of the classificatory schemes that have been proposed will no doubt be radically revised as further progress is made.

A typological classification groups languages into types according to their structural characteristics. The most famous typological classification is probably that of isolating, agglutinating, and inflecting (or fusional) languages, which was frequently invoked in the 19th century in support of an evolutionary theory of language development. Roughly speaking, an isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically unanalyzable (i.e., in which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and, even more strikingly, Vietnamese are highly isolating. An agglutinating language (e.g., Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented into morphs, each of which represents a single grammatical category. An inflecting language is one in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-European languages tend to be inflecting in this sense. For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of “singular” and “genitive.”

There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory from languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of consonants to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels, languages with a fixed word order from languages with a free word order, prefixing languages from suffixing languages, and so on. The problem lies in deciding what significance should be attached to particular typological characteristics. Although there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages to be typologically similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic relationship. Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development. From work in typology in the second half of the 20th century, it emerged that certain logically unconnected features tend to occur together, so the presence of feature A in a given language will tend to imply the presence of feature B. The discovery of unexpected implications of this kind calls for an explanation and gives a stimulus to research in many branches of linguistics.

35. Areal Classification of Language
area (n.) A term used in dialectology for any geographical region isolated on the basis of its linguistic characteristics. The study of the linguistic properties of ‘areas’ – the analysis of the divergent forms they contain, and their historical antecedents – is known as areal linguistics. An areal classification would establish areal types (or groups), such as the Scandinavian languages, or the London-influenced dialects – cases where it is possible to show certain linguistic features in common as a result of the proximity of the speech communities. Such a classifica-tion often cuts across that made on purely historical grounds. It is often possible to identify a focal area – the region from which these linguistic characteristics have spread to the area as a whole (as in the case of London) – and several other significant parts of an area have been terminologically distinguished, e.g. the transitional areas which occur between adjacent areas, the relic areas which preserve linguistic features of an earlier stage of development. Areal linguistics is contrasted with non-areal differences in language use, e.g. contrasts between male and female speech, and between some social varieties. The German term Sprachbund (‘language league’) is also widely used in the sense of a ‘linguistic area’. Areal linguistics is a way of classifying languages based on their regional location. It is not possible to fit every single language into a family structure, yet some languages do share common features which we can put down to things such as borrowing (due to close proximity or prolonged exposure).
Examples
In the European languages there are some that do not fit into the 9-branch Indo-European family tree structure.
Languages such as Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian can be explained by arriving late and being related to the Finno-Ugric family.
On the other hand languages like Euskara (spoken by the Basques in Spain) is isolated and doesn't appear to fit anywhere.