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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.
Map of major Dravidian languages. Distribution of the Indo-European language family branches across Eurasia. Area of the Papuan languages. Map of the Australian languages. Distribution of language families and isolates north of Mexico at first contact. The major South American language families. Ethnolinguistic groups of mainland Southeast Asia.
A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas . The earliest such atlas was the Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches of Georg Wenker and Ferdinand Wrede, published ...
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family— English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several ...
World language. In linguistics, a world language (sometimes global language, [ 1 ]: 101 rarely international language[ 2 ][ 3 ]) is a language that is geographically widespread and makes it possible for members of different language communities to communicate. The term may also be used to refer to constructed international auxiliary languages ...
The Romance language most widely spoken natively today is Spanish, followed by Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian, which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [ nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.