Маъсул муҳаррир: Филология фанлари доктори, профессор: Г. Х. Боқиева Тақризчилар

Ancient Persian has evolved into Farsi, Kurdish and Pashto.
In time, with enough migrations, a single language can evolve into an entire family of languages.
Each language family described below is a group of related languages with a common ancestor. Languages in the same branch are sister languages that diverged within the last 1000 to 2000 years (Latin, for example, gave rise to the Latin Branch languages in the Indo-European Family).
Languages in different branches of the same family can be referred to as cousin languages. For most families these languages would have diverged more than 20UO years ago. The exact times scales vary for each family.
Languages in the same family share many common grammatical features and many of the key words, especially older words, show their common origin.
The difference between a language and a dialect can be political rather than linguistic. For example, linguistically, Croatian and Serbian are closely related dialects of the same language. However, they are written in different scripts and are spoken by people of different religions living in Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia respectively. As such they are called different languages for political reasons.
Macedonian is considered by Bulgarians as a dialect of their language while Macedonians themselves consider it a separate language. Since Bulgaria has long claimed Macedonia as part of its territory, the reasons for each view are obvious!
Low German (spoken in Northern Germany) and Dutch (Netherlands) are linguistically dialects but politically separate languages. Low German and Swiss German are mutually unintelligible but are both considered to be German. There are more differences between Italian spoken in different cities in Italy than between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.
The language of Iraq and Morocco are both called Arabic but they differ greatly. The Mandarain speaking government of China considers China's other languages (like Cantonese and Wu) to be dialects whereas they are often very different.
These political elements will be generally ignored in this outline.
The study of languages and their relationships gives us information about how people have migrated during historical times. It also helps with the dating of developments like plant domestication and the development of tools.
For the sections on specific language families below, an Atlas would be handy.