Every quotation below was read in the source named, at the page or section given. Full citations are in the article's Sources and in the literature review. Quotations held back are in the quarantine file.
1. The young-earth model
Henry Morris, 1976
"The confounding of languages applied only to the phonologies, not to the underlying thought processes which are part of man's uniqueness."
Morris, The Genesis Record, p. 276.
"If gaps are allowed, however, these dates might conceivably be increased by, say, up to about one thousand years or more (possibly five thousand years at the very outside)."
Morris, The Genesis Record, pp. 309-310, after placing the dispersion "at about 2358 B.C." on Thiele's date for Abraham.
Carl Wieland, 1999
"At Babel, the family groups were each programmed suddenly and supernaturally with a different language. Each of these created languages has gone on to diversify into many separate languages, which are all related to each other—each group has a 'common ancestor' language."
Wieland, "Towering change", Creation 22(1), diagram caption (C).
"A prediction from all of this would be that, given the large number of languages in the world today, it should be possible to group them together into 'families' like the Indo-European family of languages. But there should be no links between one 'family' and another."
Same article, section "What about Babel?".
Charles Taylor, 1983
"However, the Genesis text does not go as far as saying God gave the people new languages; it merely says that 'God confused their language'. So I suspect that this suggestion goes a little too far to be correct."
Taylor, "What happened at Babel?", Creation 6(2), section "Distorted receiver".
K. J. Duursma, 2002
"If the percentage of word loss described above is correct, we expect to see many similarities, still, between all languages in each family after only 5,000 years since Babel. However, the absence of any contact between languages in one family, over such a period, could result in greater word loss ... Also, some languages have a much quicker word loss, for cultural reasons."
Duursma, "The Tower of Babel account affirmed by linguistics", Journal of Creation 16(3), section "Language families". The only young-earth proposal found of faster change after Babel.
John Oller, 2008
"Also, we can make a testable prediction: the number of families will be reduced in the future to no fewer than the groups named in Genesis 10 where the Table of Nations appears."
Oller, "More Than PIE", Answers 3(2), section "Babel—Key to Unlocking Language Families".
"The rate of change of known subgroups—notably those based on Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and the Germanic and Slavic languages—shows that the whole number of languages in the world today could easily have been produced within a space of 4,000 years."
Same section.
Bodie Hodge, 2013
"So I suggest that the 78 is a minimum number of language families (that is a tally of those listed in Genesis 10 subtracting Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and Peleg)."
Hodge, Tower of Babel, page not available. The breakdown of the 78 by son of Noah, once printed here, could be read only once and is in the quarantine file, item 5.
Ken Ham, 2023
"But, at Babel, he divided this language, creating about one hundred language families—and that's how many language families exist today!"
Ham, "How Many Languages?", Answers with Ken Ham, volume 149, radio transcript.
Murray Adamthwaite, 2019
"Two phenomena stand out; first, all these languages appear on the scene at about the same time—the mid-third millennium BC on conventional chronology. For secular scholars, their origins remain obscure."
Adamthwaite, "The languages of Babel", Creation 42(1), section "The first phenomenon".
2. How many families there are
"If the best explanation for the similarities are inheritance from common ancestor, languages are classified as belonging to the same family. A language which, by this principle, does not belong to the same family as any other language is also called an isolate."
Glottolog 5.3, "Glottolog information", Classification, step 6.
"The ultimate number of language families in the world is the set of independent families (including isolates) that cannot reliably be shown to be related to any other language family."
Lyle Campbell, "How Many Language Families are there in the World?", 2018, p. 137.
"Greenberg (1987) classifies the world's languages into the 15 families shown in List 7.3"
Merritt Ruhlen, A Guide to the World's Languages, 1987, p. 260, the source of the low young-earth counts; on p. 261 he expects "future consolidation of some of the groups in List 7.3".
3. How old the families are
"Our main analysis (Fig. 2) produced an estimated date for the root of the Indo-European language family that is too early to be compatible with the Steppe hypothesis: ~8120 yr B.P., with a 95% credible region of 6740 to 9610 yr B.P."
Paul Heggarty and colleagues, Science 381, 2023, Results.
"enforcing direct ancestry does move the median root date estimate into a far more recent time frame, younger by 3632 years (42.1%), from 8629 yr B.P. (Fig. 4, SA8a) to 4997 yr B.P. (Fig. 4, SA8b)."
Same paper, "Validation, and robustness analyses": the young-earth reader's best mainstream number, in a run its authors reject.
"What is known with a fair degree of certainty is the time between proto-Indo-Aryan and the modern Indo-Aryan languages - something of the order of 3,000 years. But how can anyone tell that the development from proto-Indo-European to proto-Indo-Aryan took another 3,000 years?"
R. M. W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages, 1997, p. 47.
"Although the calibration dates older than 2500 BP are all archaeological, figure 2 shows that younger dates of all four types are about equally close to the regression line."
Eric Holman and colleagues, Current Anthropology 52, 2011, p. 853.
"our time estimates are based on a single age calibration of the Western Desert subgroup and scale approximately linearly with this calibration."
Remco Bouckaert, Claire Bowern and Quentin Atkinson on Pama-Nyungan, 2018, Results.
4. One origin or several
"while perhaps most linguists believe it is possible that there was a single original human language from which all others have developed, most further believe it is impossible on the basis of extant evidence ever to be able to show that this is the case."
Lyle Campbell and William Poser, Language Classification, 2008, p. 366, note 3.
"The consensus of opinion among mainstream historical linguists is that while all human languages are likely to be genetically related, the remoter relationships cannot be demonstrated by reliable linguistic methods because the languages in question have diverged too much."
Donald Ringe, On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison, 1992, p. 1.
"Unless there is a breakthrough in the way language families are demonstrated—that goes beyond basic vocabulary—this time limit cannot be improved upon: if languages share too little vocabulary we would not accept they are related while if languages share a lot of vocabulary, we do not think the relation is old."
Harald Hammarström, Journal of Language Evolution 1, 2016, p. 23.
"In the long run we expect the evidence for monogenesis of extant languages to become so compelling that the question will be not whether all the world's languages are related, but why it took the linguistic community so long to recognize this obvious fact."
John Bengtson and Merritt Ruhlen, "Global Etymologies", 1994, p. 292.
"There are those, of course, who see the connection between creationism and Proto-World in just the opposite way, citing linguists' claims about Proto-World as self-evident support of the truth of the biblical story of creation and Babel"
Campbell and Poser, 2008, p. 365, note 2.
"In short, this is a case of correlation in, correlation out—and proof of nothing."
Paul Heggarty, reply to Pagel and colleagues on Eurasiatic, PNAS 110, 2013, paragraph 2.
"Therefore, Asia (where the Babel was supposed to be) might be a more appropriate best-fit origin for modern languages if modern languages have a common origin."
Chuan-Chao Wang and colleagues, comment in Science 335, 2012, final paragraph. A geographic aside, on a margin in the third decimal place.
"However, because phonemes change rapidly, they cannot provide information about more ancient evolutionary processes."
Keith Hunley, Claire Bowern and Meghan Healy, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279, 2012, abstract.
"In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language."
Wendy Sandler and colleagues on Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, PNAS 102, 2005, abstract.
5. How fast languages change
"We take this to mean that on the average about 81% of the basic-root-morphemes of a language will survive as cognates after 1000 years, for all languages, at all times."
Robert Lees, Language 29, 1953, p. 119.
"Our findings clearly disprove the basic assumption of glottochronology 'that fundamental vocabulary changes at a constant rate.'"
Knut Bergsland and Hans Vogt, Current Anthropology 3, 1962, p. 125.
"If relative isolation and the small size of the tribe accounts for the low retention rate of East Greenlandic, the same circumstances may account for the high retention rate of Modern Icelandic."
Same paper, p. 128.
"We demonstrate that larger populations have higher rates of gain of new words whereas smaller populations have higher rates of word loss."
Lindell Bromham and colleagues, PNAS 112, 2015, p. 2097.
"Because gain and loss showed opposing patterns, overall rates of change (gain plus loss) were not significantly related to population size"
Same paper, p. 2099.
"Most languages of all three nongenetic types will derive most of their basic vocabulary from a single source."
Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, 1988, p. 212.
6. Rate variation among meanings
"Instead, similarity decays in the manner of radioactivity from a mixture of numerous radioelements"
Isidore Dyen, Joseph Kruskal and Paul Black, An Indoeuropean Classification, 1992, p. 7.
"If the lexicostatistic test list is to be valid for different magnitudes of time depth, it has to be made up of elements having approximately the same likelihood to persist."
Morris Swadesh, International Journal of American Linguistics 21, 1955, p. 126.
7. Families written down before Babel
"Tomb U-j, which dates to ca. 3320 bc, is a rectangular, mudbrick tomb with twelve interconnected chambers"
Elise MacArthur in Woods (ed.), Visible Language, 2010, p. 119.
"In sum, the evidence that the language represented by the proto-cuneiform script is, in fact, Sumerian is quite slim, being based on perhaps fifteen instances of phonetic writings"
Christopher Woods in Visible Language, pp. 44-45.
"We have to wait for about four hundred years for our next archaic texts from Ur, dated approximately 2800 BC ... the notation of a few morphological elements and phonetic glosses provides convincing evidence that the language of the texts is indeed Sumerian."
Piotr Michalowski in Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, 2004, p. 20.
"The history of Egypt would begin soon after the dispersion from Babel, around 2100 B.C."
John Ashton and David Down, Unwrapping the Pharaohs, 2006, p. 200.