The radiation of languages that grew from the original Latin is also a good analogy to evolution. You can trace the roots of words back to their origins, somewhat like DNA. There's a field of linguistic archeology (or whatever it's called) that carries this back quite a ways, to Sanskrit and maybe earlier. I think it's been largely superseded by DNA tracing, but I believe the field still exists.
There's a controversy in linguistics over whether you can show families related in superfamiles and the latter related in super-superfamilies. I think most linguists accept that, historically speaking, a branching evolutionary pattern has occurred. However, far fewer believe that you can actually show this by analysis of the languages.
The problem is that languages change faster than even the fastest molecular clocks in organisms. You know the limitation involved in that. The faster the clock, the more accurate it is for recent events. Nevertheless, the fast clock's signal is lost in total turnover as you try to go back beyond a certain range limit.