Proto-World

Okay, so let's pretend that everyone in the world speaks a different language - kind of like your friends who speak a different language at home. But a long, long time ago, everyone spoke the same language. We call this really old language "proto-world."

Just like how baby birds learn to chirp from their mommy birds, people learned to talk by listening to the people around them. But as people moved to different parts of the world, they started to talk a little different from each other, just like how your friends might start to talk a little different if they move to a different country.

So over time, people changed how they spoke, and proto-world started to break up into different languages. But just like how different birds all have the same type of chirp, all the different languages still have some things in common. So when people study different languages, they can sometimes guess what proto-world might have sounded like a long time ago. And that's why proto-world is important to people who study languages.