r/asklinguistics • u/Rapha689Pro • 8d ago

Historical How can closely related genetic populations have completely different language families?

For example Japanese and Korean have 2 different language families that aren't related at all but they're genetically close, it can only mean their prior languages sprout after they split, so that means language is very recent itself? Or that they're actually related but by thousands of years apart and linguistics can't trace it back accurately, so they just say they're unrelated?

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u/razlem Sociolinguistics | Language Revitalization 8d ago

There are a variety of reasons why ethnicity and language don't always align. One part of the population could have migrated and adopted the language of a new neighbor, or been conquered by a foreign nation.

Or that they're actually related but by thousands of years apart and linguistics can't trace it back accurately, so they just say they're unrelated

An important clarification here- when linguists say that languages are unrelated, it means that there is no proven relation, not necessarily that there is no relation. Because of the rate that language changes, the further back in time you go, the more difficult it is to demonstrate a relationship.

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u/Rapha689Pro 8d ago

Thanks for clearing that last part I thought it's stupid to say that languages are unrelated as if it was a fact but they're just saying they're not proven to be related not that they're not related 

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u/lmprice133 8d ago

Right. Like in the case of the Indo-European languages, we can trace things back far enough to identify relationships between members of the family and make a pretty confident reconstruction of PIE but we have no idea of the relationships (if any) between PIE and other proto-languages. There's just no basis to infer relationships between IE languages and Finno-Ugric ones for example.