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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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Go straight to a continent:
Africa   America   Asia   Europe   Oceania   


Africa

Africa alone counts one third of the languages spoken on the planet, approximately 2,000.
Languages of the Niger-Congo family are spoken over most of the continent - it is the largest language family in the world (approximately 1,300 languages).
Among the other families: the Afro-Asian language family (which includes for example Hebrew, Arabic dialects, and languages of Ancient Egypt), the Nilo-Saharan family (along the lower Nile), the Mande family (West Africa), etc.
Many of these languages are understudied, and the number of families and groups varies as science evolves, revealing a tremendous yet seriously threatened linguistic wealth.


America

The American continent is home to the highest number of native language families (excluding the official languages imported from Europe): over fifty families, with a total of approximately 400 languages.
This great linguistic and cultural wealth is endangered nowadays: most of these languages are threatened with extinction, and many of them disappear before they were even studied. Researchers believe, for example, that 90% of the languages of North America are likely to disappear before the end of the century.


Asia

With nearly 2,000 languages, Asia comes right behind Africa in terms of number of languages.
The Asian continent includes the Sino-Tibetan family (with Mandarin, among others), the world’s second largest family by number of its speakers (right behind the Indo-European family).
Among other language families in Asia: the Austro-Asian languages (which includes Vietnamese), the Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, Mongolian, Turkish and Tungusic languages, the Dravidian languages of Southern India, the nearly extinct languages of the Kamchatka Peninsula… which clearly shows the richness of this part of the world’s linguistic diversity. Besides, many language families in Asia happen to be transcontinental, meaning they are spoken both in Asia and other continents.


Europe

The European continent is “dominated” by the Indo-European language family, with languages such as French, English, Spanish, but also Russian, Farsi, or even Hindi and Nepali, not to mention endangered languages such as Breton, Yiddish, Sorbian, Kashubian, etc.
The Indo-European family is the largest language family in the world by number of its speakers: approximately 3 billion across all five continents.
Europe also counts a few other distinct families: the Uralic languages (among which Finnish and Hungarian), the three Caucasian language families, and also Basque which incidentally identifies with no other known language in the world.


Oceania

The Austronesian family is the largest in this part of the world in terms of number of speakers. These languages are spoken in South-East Asia, in a large number of the Pacific Islands, and as far as Madagascar.
Australian languages do not belong to this family. Most Australian languages are understudied and very seriously threatened: probably less than a hundred languages remain out of the near 700 native languages believed to be used in Australia before colonization.
Papua New Guinea is the country bearing the highest linguistic diversity in the world. Estimates account for approximately 800 languages, shared over a very large number of distinct families.




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