Waddya call groups of languages within families? I have been labouring under the (mis?)apprehension that "family" referred to big groups, like Indo-European. If that is so, what's the name for the groups within that family, such as Indic, Germanic, etc.?
It has been forty years since I sat in a junior-level class in Linguistic Anthropology but I think the taxonomy we used, updated in terms of the example provided, worked like this:
Kingdom: Human Language
Phylum: Indo-European
Family: Teutonic/Germanic
Subfamily: English
Language: American English
Dialect: Southern Californian
Subdialect: Valley Girl
Thanks. The reason for my query was that "family" is often used where you have "kingdom". For example,
here. This has ensured that my neuron is all in a tizz.
I'd say: Indo-European family, Italic or Germanic sub-family, Romance group. That's about as fine-grained as it gets. Not as many languages as species.
[Fixed typo.]
Only one neuron, Max? It must be too busy to be tizzy.
Hey, that's an interesting chart Max. Thanks for the link.