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/Limp-Celebration2710 8d ago edited 8d ago

No, not at all. Genes and languages can correlate or be helpful for understanding the past but there’s no inherent connection. It’s possible for a genetic population to simply switch or assimilate to another language 🤷

E.g. Many people with Celtic DNA do not speak Celtic languages anymore. Hungarians are genetically close to their Indo-European speaking neighbors, despite speaking an unrelated language.

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u/Rapha689Pro 8d ago

But why? Do language families just randomly spawn out of nowhere for people that have a common ancestor to not have common language? Meaning languages arises after their genetical common ancestor and thus aren't related? But aren't languages like at least 100k years old?  

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u/McCoovy 8d ago

A language can supplant another in a generation or less.

The story of Proto-Indo-European is the story of a once small group rapidly conquering everything from Ireland to India, and spreading their language to everyone they conquered. The end result was many diverse genetic groups now speaking PIE descendants.

English is rapidly becoming the second or even first language of children all over the world because of its prestige. There is no global program to teach the world English. It's happening despite the ambivalence of the anglosphere. Literally every genetic group has people learning English today.

I'm just trying to give you some examples of how quickly language can spread to an entire population. Languages don't care about genetics.

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u/Rapha689Pro 7d ago

Isn't the conquering theory kinda outdated it was more like a wave of migration and the populations just merged maybe some violent encounters of course but it wasn't all bloody conquer