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Language families

A language family is a grouping of linguistically linked languages, stemming from a common ancestral mother-language called Protolanguage.

Most languages in the world belong to a specific family. Languages that have no demonstrable relation with others, and cannot be classified within a specific family, are generally known as language isolates.

Creole languages are the only ones to be neither isolates, nor members of a linguistic family. They form their own different type of languages.

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Africa   America   Asia   Europe   Oceania   


Africa

A third of the total number of languages, approximately 2000 languages, can be found in Africa.
The group of Niger-Congo languages is spoken across most of the continent - it is the world’s largest group of languages (approximately 1300 languages).
Among the other families, one can find the Afro-Asian group (which includes Hebrew, Arabic dialects and the languages of Ancient Egypt, for example), the Nilo-Saharan languages (along the lower Nile), the group of Mande languages (Western Africa) etc.
Many of these languages are hardly studied, and the number of groups and groupings changes as science progresses, revealing a vast linguistic wealth, but one that is seriously threatened.


America

The American continent has the greatest number of groups of native languages (if we exclude the official languages imported from Europe), in other words more than fifty language groups, which gather a total of approximately 400 languages.
Today, this linguistic and cultural wealth is greatly endangered: the majority of these languages threaten to become extinct, and many have disappeared before they could be studied. Scientists estimate, for example, that 90% of the languages of North America are likely to disappear during this century.


Asia

With nearly 2000 languages, Asia comes right after Africa in terms of the number of spoken languages.
It comprises the Sino-Tibetan languages (to which Mandarin belongs), the second largest group in terms of the number of speakers (after the Indo-European group).
The Austro-Asian languages (to which Vietnamese belongs), the Tai-Kadai languages, the Hmong-Mien languages, the Mongolian, Turkish, Tungunsic, Dravidian languages of Southern India and the nearly extinct languages of Kamchatka, illustrate the very rich linguistic diversity that can be found on the Asian continent.
Besides, a lot of Asian spoken language groups have the particularity of being transcontinental, in other words, they are spoken in Asia but also on other continents.


Europe

The European continent is dominated by the group of Indo-European languages such as French, English, Spanish, but also Russian, Farsi or even Hindi and Nepali, and also endangered languages such as Breton, Yiddish, Sorabe, Kashubian etc.
The Indo-European group is the largest group in the world in terms of speakers: there are nearly 3 billion speakers across five continents.
Other groups also exist in Europe: languages from the Ural region (particularly Finnish and Hungarian), the three groups of Caucasian languages, and Basque as well, which has no link with any other language.


Oceania

The group of Austronesian languages is the largest group in terms of speakers for that continent. These languages are spoken in South-East Asia, in a large number of Pacific Islands and as far as Madagascar.
Australian languages do not belong to this group, they are generally unknown and very endangered of disappearing: among the 700 native languages that were said to exist before the colonisation, only less than a hundred still remain.
Finally, Papua New-Guinea is the territory with the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. According to estimates, nearly 800 languages are spoken, distributed among a large number of distinct families.




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