The American Christmas Tree Association, the artificial-tree retailers' group, said it welcomes a stronger marketing effort from live Christmas tree farmers.

WSJ: Fir Real? Christmas Trees in Crisis as Americans Flock to Fakes

To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific.

ECONOMIST: Languages and species evolve in surprisingly similar ways

The group's campaign manager Colin Watson said it was not about being "anti-tree".

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