Genus (linguistics)

In linguistics, a genus is a group of phylogenetically related languages inside a linguistic family, in particular a genus is a group of languages which can be recognized as related languages without using complex methods of historical linguistics. The notion of genus was proposed by M. Dryer, and is used commonly in some academic projects such as WALS. According to WALS most families can be subdivided into a certain number of genera, so the notion is similar to the term subfamily.