Muriel G. answered • 09/25/20
Historical Archaeologist with Years of Tutoring Experience
This is more of a linguistics question than an archaeology question, but the short answer is that all modern languages are descendants of at least one ancient language. Linguistic evolution doesn't work the same ways that biological evolution does, but here are a few family tree-style examples for you:
Egyptian developed into Coptic, but with significant Greek influence
Latin with local variations developed into a multitude of different languages from Italian to Romanian
English developed out of a soup of French, German, Norse, Gaelic, and a few others.
A mixture of French and several language groups from west Africa developed into Haitian Creole
There are examples of isolated languages, like Basque, that don't have any living language relatives, but that doesn't mean that they didn't in the past. No language exists in a vacuum. And even so, languages change and shift extremely rapidly even in isolation, so there's no guarantee that Basque speakers hundreds of years ago would be able to understand the Basque speakers of today, and vice versa.
