“The family tree model is a useful presentational tool which has been successfully applied to other language groups, for example Eskimo-Aleut, Sino-Tibetan or Austro-Asiatic, but it is nonetheless misleading in a number of respects. Firstly, it takes far too little account of language contact (see Case study on next page): the dotted arrow in the diagram above is an attempt to represent the very strong lexical influence of (Norman) French on Middle English, which belong to quite separate branches of the Indo-European trunk. The branching works well where there is a physical separation between speaker groups, allowing varieties to develop independently, as in the case of Afrikaans and Dutch, but in most cases the picture is rather messier, with branches often confusingly intertwined.”