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Map of the main language families of the world The language families of Africa Map of the Austronesian languages 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 ...
Language family. 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.
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 ...
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [ 7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties, such as Arabic, Lahnda, Persian, Malay, Pashto, and Chinese .
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 ...
Languages are grouped by diachronic relatedness into language families. [2] In other words, languages are grouped based on how they were developed and evolved throughout history, with languages which descended from a common ancestor being grouped into the same language family.
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. [ 4][ 5][ 6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain.