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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.
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 Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family.They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages.They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, [a] the Horn of Africa, [b] [c] Malta, [d] and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia.
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 ...
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between ...
Language classification. In linguistics, language classification is the grouping of related languages into the same category. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification. [1]
For example, languages with little linguistic distance, like Dutch and German, are considered siblings. Dutch and German are siblings in the West-Germanic language group. Some language siblings are closer to each other in terms of linguistic distance than to other linguistic siblings.
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.