Language families

Two Sinitic languages that share a writing tradition but are not mutually intelligible: tones, vocabulary, where each is spoken, and why …

Why speakers understand each other in conversation but cannot read each other's newspapers, and where the vocabulary splits.

A single Shtokavian base split by script, standard and politics; concrete examples of the differences a learner meets.

Grammar that Afrikaans dropped, spelling that changed, and how much a Dutch speaker actually follows.

One spoken country, two written norms; how schools handle it and which a learner should pick.

Shared grammar, three scripts and three standards across Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Mutual intelligibility, army-and-navy politics and how classification schemes such as the Linguasphere Register handle the boundary.

Why counts run from about 3,000 to over 8,000: what each catalogue counts, and how the Linguasphere frame splits outer and inner languages.

639-1, 639-2, 639-3 and macrolanguages: what each code length means and why the same language has several codes.

Vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, moribund, extinct: what each label requires and who assigns it.

How the big families rank when you count languages rather than speakers, and why the two orders differ so much.

A step-by-step method using classification catalogues, including how to read a Linguasphere code from the outside in.

Proto-languages as documents, 'primitive' languages, Basque as a mystery, and what evidence actually establishes a family.

Regular sound correspondences, the comparative method, and why shared words alone prove nothing.

What an isolate is, which are best documented, and why 'no relatives' is a statement about evidence.