What is the origin of languages?
In response to this question and with data taken from the web Ethnologue, Finnish-Swedish illustrator and caricaturist Minna Sundberg mapped the Indo-European and Uralic languages, using a tree as a metaphor, where each branch represents a linguistic family.
This successful creation was praised by many linguists, since it clearly and proportionally represents in its branches the number of native speakers of each language.
In the beginning, the tree is divided into two branches, the European and the Indo-Iranian, these two in turn are divided into Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages to end in languages, such as Spanish, English, German, French and Italian, that we know now.
“In the beginning, the tree is divided into two branches, the European and the Indo-Iranian”
With this great infographic, Sundberg demonstrates how the characters in her webcomic “Stand Still, Stay Silent” can communicate without speaking the same language since the connections between groups of languages descend from a common root language.