Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, English, French, Italian, and German. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [ 4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe .)
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.
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.
Number of total speakers of each Romance language, as fractions of the total (2024) 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 specific problem is: Dubious contents, WP:OVERLINKING including linking place and language names in each of the alternative languages it's provided in, and there's an entire section that needs to be de-italicized. Please help improve this article if you can. (September 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
The Celtic languages ( / ˈkɛltɪk / KEL-tik) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from Proto-Celtic. [ 1] The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, [ 2] following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh ...