Let's Talk Linguistics!

Now I'm no prodigy, but I am surely fascinated of the linguistics and stuff behind every language.
And now I want to do segments on language families.

Wikipedia defines a language family as "a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family."

Now, if you may ask, what is a "proto-language"?
You know how when a tree starts to branch out, there is this big stem, then these tiny branches. The tiny branches are the languages we see now, while the big stem is the language that started it all.

Most new languages have its origins as dialects or creoles of the original proto-language. An example of a present day creole is Singlish(more discussion later).

A "creole" is a rather slang version of the original language(s) mostly used by the young people that speak the original language(s), while a "dialect" is formed by evolution of the origin language that only happened in a specific portion of the empire/nation/kingdom it belongs to. Example, how did you think Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu/Malay, and Bahasa Tagalog come into existence? Of course, there was once only one language spoken in all of those areas, then as time passed, each subdivision of the whole total area ended up evolving their own dialect, until it came to the point where they are minimally similar to each other. And that's not even counting the different colonial influences that somehow remolded some of these languages.

So, more about Singlish, as promised earlier.

Singlish is a Singaporean creole based on more than four languages. It's based on Mandarin, English, Hokkien, Teochew, Tamil and some others that may be developing as we speak.

An example sentence would be: "That atas ah beng should just balik kampong la. Sibeh goondu"

The English words are obvious, "atas" and "balik kampong" are Malay, "ah beng" and "Sibeh" are Hokkien/Teochew, while "goondu" is Tamil.

That sentence basically meant(may vary, so please calm down and peacefully inform me of inaccuracy:

"That gloating gangster should just go back where he came from. Very dumb."

As obviously seen in the above example, and in other examples from the Web, this particular creole has evolved from the fact that the people speaking these languages have been coexisting for a while, and has adapted to each other's words and expressions.

To conclude...

Language families are rather complex, and an example of which is Austronesian.

A proto-language is the "big stem" where all the various branches came from.

A "creole" is mostly slang, but may be considered a "dialect" or even a "language" by some.

Language branches evolve from dialects that have gone astray from their original language.