What are the largest language families? The six largest language families by language count are Niger-Congo, Austronesian The Austronesian languages is a language family that is widely dispersed throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, with a few members on continental Asia.Austronesian languages
What are the two largest language families in the world?
What are the two largest language families in the world? Indo-European and. Sino-Tibetan... Show more. Earth Science Science Geography.
What are the 10 most popular languages in the world?
Languages with at least 10 million first-language speakers; Rank Language Speakers (millions) Percentage of world pop. (March 2019) Language family Branch 1 Mandarin Chinese: 918 11.922% Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 2 Spanish: 480 5.994% Indo-European: Romance: 3 English: 379 4.922% Indo-European: Germanic: 4 Hindi (sanskritised Hindustani) 341 4.429% Indo-European
What is an example of language family?
What Is An Example Of A Language Family? There are many different languages in a language family, each descended from a common language. Germanic languages are an example of this. Germanic languages are generally described as being divided into three groups by linguists: West Germanic, North Germanic, and East Germanic.
What is the third most spoken language in the world?
- Mandarin Chinese: Mandarin Chinese is the official language of China, Singapore and Taiwan. The language is read and written in the pictoral form where in each character represents a word. ...
- English: needless to say, the second most commonly spoken language is English. ...
- Hindi: Hindi is the third most common language in the world spoken widely in India. ...
How many major language families are there?
How many language families are there? According to Ethnologue (16th edition), there are 147 language families in the world.
What are the 4 largest language families?
Largest Language Families By Number of SpeakersIndo-European - 2.910 Billion. The Indo-European language family is the largest in the world. ... Sino-Tibetan Languages - 1.268 Billion. The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world. ... Niger-Congo Languages - 437 Million. ... Austronesian Languages - 386 Million.
What are the 2 largest language families?
Although the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families two of the largest in the world, linguists have categorized more than one hundred language families around the globe.
What are the three major families of languages?
SOUTH ASIA (Indian subcontinent, Pakistan) 1) Dravidian [Telugu, Tamil, Kannada; the second most important family in India]. 2) Munda [consists of a number of languages spoken on the east coast of India]. The remaining languages are Indo-European.
What are the 7 language families?
The six largest language families by language count are Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, and Afro-Asiatic. for at least one language in the family. Each of these families has at least 5% of the world's languages, and together account for two-thirds of all languages.
Which is the smallest language family?
Afro-Asiatic The Afro-Asiatic language family includes 381 languages, making it the smallest language family on this list. These languages are primarily spoken in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and several islands in Western Asia.
What is the oldest language family?
the Dravidian familyThe Tamil language is recognized as the oldest language in the world and it is the oldest language of the Dravidian family. This language had a presence even around 5,000 years ago. According to a survey, 1863 newspapers are published in the Tamil language only every day.
What is the oldest dead language?
the Sumerian languageThe archaeological proof we have today allows us to state that the oldest dead language in the world is the Sumerian language. Dating back to at least 3500 BC, the oldest proof of written Sumerian was found in today's Iraq, on an artifact known as the Kish Tablet.
What is the most spoken language in the world?
If you count only native speakers, Mandarin Chinese is the largest.Mandarin Chinese is the largest language in the world when counting only first language (native) speakers. ... When factoring in second-, third-, and higher language speakers, English is the largest language in the world.More items...
What is the world's largest language family Why?
The single largest language family, Indo-European has about 150 languages and about three billion speakers.
What is the most widely spoken language family in the world today?
What is the most widely spoken language family in the world today? Indo-European.
What do you mean by language family?
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.
What is the third largest language family?
Language families by speakersLanguage familyApprox. # of speakers% of world population1. Indo-European2.562 billion44.78%2. Sino-Tibetan1.276 billion22.28%3. Niger-Congo358 million6.26%4. Afro-Asiatic340 million5.93%8 more rows
What is the largest language in the world?
English is the largest language in the world, if you count both native and non-native speakers. If you count only native speakers, Mandarin Chinese is the largest. Mandarin Chinese is the largest language in the world when counting only first language (native) speakers.
What is the oldest language family?
the Dravidian familyThe Tamil language is recognized as the oldest language in the world and it is the oldest language of the Dravidian family. This language had a presence even around 5,000 years ago. According to a survey, 1863 newspapers are published in the Tamil language only every day.
Which language family is the most widely diffused?
Indo-EuropeanIndo-European Indo-European is the most extensively used language family, evidenced by its predominant usage in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin America.
How many people speak Afro-Asian?
Today, 250 million people speak approximately 250 Afro-Asian languages. Proto-Afro-Asiatic is believed to be the ancestral dialect from which all modern and extinct Afro-Asian languages are derived. This protolanguage has a long history, and experts place it around 15,000–10,000 BCE in the Mesolithic Period.
How many languages are spoken in Trans-New Guinea?
There are approximately 400 languages spoken in Trans-New Guinea. It encompasses the central cordillera, which ranges northwest to southeast through New Guinea, as well as parts of the southern and northern lowlands. It can also be present on the islands of Timor, Alor, and Pantar.
What is the Trans New Guinea language?
Trans-New Guinea. The Trans-New Guinea family of languages is a diverse group of Papuan languages spoken in New Guinea and surrounding islands, probably the world’s third-largest by the number of languages. Trans-New Guinea is considered to be descended from Proto-Trans New Guinea. Around 3 million people speak the languages of this language family.
How many languages are spoken in the Austronesian family?
Austronesian is one of the world’s largest and most geographically diverse language families, with 1268 languages.
What is the largest language family in the world?
One of the world’s largest language families is Sino-Tibetan. In terms of speakers, it is second only to the Indo-European language family. There are 403 strongly differentiated languages in the family, with a large geographical range (South Asia, East Asia, North Asia, South-East Asia), great linguistic difficulty, and a long history.
How many people speak the Niger-Congo language?
The Niger-Congo language family includes almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most commonly spoken languages. About 600 million people (85 percent of the continent’s population) speak the language of this language family. The Niger-Congo language family divided into numerous branches:
What is the language that generated the creation of other languages in the language family?
The language that generated the creation of other languages in the language family is known as protolanguage. As stated in Ethnologue, six language families predominate among the 142 different language families as ...
How Do We Know Which Languages Belong To Which Languages?
The further back you go, the harder it is to figure out who’s related to who. If two languages are very similar — take, for example, any of the Scandinavian languages, which are practically mutually intelligible — it’s not too hard to determine that they’re related. But what if there are just a few things in common?
How to determine a language family?
This is done by comparing old forms of languages and seeing how similar the grammar and vocabulary are, and then coming up with a theoretical Proto- language. Linguists examine Indo-European languages and see that certain words are very similar across languages. “Father,” for example, is believed to come from the Proto-Indo-European “pehter.” There is no actual written evidence of this word, but linguists survey various languages and see Sanskrit pitar, Latin pater, Old Persian pitar and Old Irish athir. From that, linguists can determine that they all likely come from the same root word. One word doesn’t make a language family, though, and so historical reconstruction needs to look at much more vocabulary before being able to decide on the classification of a language.
Why are Amerindian languages so hard to learn?
The Amerindian Language Family — A catch-all for the languages spoken in North and South America before the arrival of the Europeans, the Amerindian languages are some of the hardest in the world to study because so much of their history was destroyed by colonialism.
How many languages are there in the Mayan language family?
The Mayan Language Family — A group of 32 languages that are indigenous to North America, the Mayan languages has survived better than any other language family in the Americas.
Why is the Romance language family used as an example?
The Romance language family is so often used as an example not only because the languages are widely spoken, but also because there is a clear history showing how they evolved from Vulgar Latin to their modern iterations. As far as language families go, this clarity is uncommon.
What languages are spoken in Europe?
The Germanic Language Family — The family of English and German, the Germanic languages also include the Nordic and Scandinavian languages, as well as a few others spoken in Europe. The Slavic Language Family — Spoken throughout Russia and in parts of Eastern and Northern Europe, the Slavic languages are another part of ...
Why are branches useful?
The concept of branches is also useful because usually these new languages form by splitting off from each other. And within any large language family, there might be smaller language families. Without extending the tree metaphor any further, the simplest definition of a language family is simply “any group of languages ...
How many languages are spoken in Austronesian?
Austronesian Languages - 386 Million. The Austronesian language family is the fourth largest in the world in terms of the number of speakers. It is made up of 1,224 daughter languages and has approximately 386 million speakers spread throughout Oceania, Maritime Southeast Asia, and a few regions of mainland Asia.
What languages did the Austronesian people speak?
Some of the most widespread Austronesian languages include Javanese, Tagalog, and Malay. This language family once covered the largest area on earth, until it was surpassed by the Euro-Indonesian family during the era of European colonization.
What is the third largest language in Africa?
The third largest language family in the world and the largest in Africa is the Niger-Congo. It consists of 1,524 daughter languages and has around 437 million speakers throughout Africa. This language family is further divided into 6 subgroups: Katla, Atlantic-Congo, Ijo, Dogon, Mande, and Rashad. Of the Niger-Congo languages, Swahili is the most widely used, with between 2 and 15 million native speakers and between 50 and 100 million second language speakers. It is the official language of Kenya, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other languages, however, have a larger number of native speakers, including Igbo, Shona, Yoruba, and Fula.
What is the largest language family in the world?
The Indo-European language family is the largest in the world. It consists of 437 daughter languages and has an estimated 2.91 billion speakers across Europe and Asia. This number of speakers represents nearly half of the total global population. many languages in the Indo-European family are widely used, including English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Punjabi, Bengali, and Hindustani. All of these modern languages descend from Proto-Indo-European, which developed during the Neolithic age. As the human population dispersed throughout the region, distance and geographic barriers created isolated pockets of civilizations. Over time, new languages and dialects formed. Some of the most important of these early languages include Latin, Mycenaean Greek, and Vedic Sanskrit.
What are some examples of languages that are not part of any family?
With this happens, it is called a language isolate. Examples of languages that are language isolates include Korean, Sumerian, and Elamite.
How many languages are there in the world?
At least 135 languages families have been identified throughout the world, each of them belonging to a different linguistic family.
What is the official language of Niger?
Of the Niger-Congo languages, Swahili is the most widely used, with between 2 and 15 million native speakers and between 50 and 100 million second language speakers. It is the official language of Kenya, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other languages, however, have a larger number of native speakers, including Igbo, Shona, ...
What is ethnologue research?
About Ethnologue Ethnologue is the research center for language intelligence. We help our clients identify languages, find where they’re spoken, get population estimates, and more.
What are the six largest language families?
The six largest language families by language count are Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, and Afro-Asiatic . Of the 142 different language families, these six stand out as the major language families of the world. They can be found throughout the world, spreading uniquely to different regions and countries.
Which language family has the most speakers?
These six families also make up five-sixths of the world’s population. Based on speaker count, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan are the largest two language families, with over 4.6 billion speakers between them. The two most spoken languages are in these families – English is classified as Indo-European, and Mandarin Chinese is classified as Sino-Tibetan.
Which two languages are the largest?
Each of these families has at least 5% of the world’s languages, and together account for two-thirds of all languages. Niger-Congo and Austronesian are the two largest from this perspective, each with over 1,000 languages due to the incredible language diversity in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, respectively.
What are some examples of languages that are not related to any family?
Note: There are a minority of languages that do not belong to any known language family. These languages are called language isolates because they have no living relatives. One example of a language isolate is the Basque language, which is spoken in parts of Spain and France. Additionally, Creole languages are languages that are formed from the blend of two or more languages.
What is the study of human languages called?
The study of human languages is called linguistics . The branch of linguistics that is primarily concerned with how languages are related to one another and how they change over time is called historical linguistics . Historical linguistics began to develop as a science during the 19th century when scholars realized that various languages were somehow related to one another. Two of the most influential historical linguists of the 19th century were the Grimm Brothers, who are mostly known for their compellation of German fairy tales.
Why are English and German not able to understand each other's languages?
However, English and German speakers are not able to understand each other's languages unless they take the time to learn the other language. One of the reasons for this is that English has been heavily influenced by Latin and French, both of which are Romance languages. This has made the vocabulary of English diverge considerably from other Germanic languages. In some ways, English is a hybrid of a Germanic and Romance language.
What is the Afro-Asiatic language family?
Afro-Asiatic language family - This language family includes ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, and many important extinct languages such as Akkadian. Some of the first writing systems in the world were created by speakers of these languages. These languages are mainly spoken in North Africa and Western Asia. Aramaic, which was probably Jesus' native language, was a Semitic language.
How many languages are there in the world?
There are about 147 languages families in the world. Here is a list of a few of them:
What is a language family?
Most of the languages of the world belong to a language family. A language family is a group of languages that all descend from a common ancestor. Languages within a language family share many commonalities in vocabulary and grammar. Some closely-related languages within a language family are even mutually intelligible. This means that the speaker of one language can more or less understand the speaker of the second language without formally learning the second language.
Where did Romance language originate?
One of these branches, the Italic branch, was spoken primarily in Italy. All the Italic languages except for Latin quickly became extinct. Latin was the language of the Romans. They spread their language to what is now France, Spain, Portugal, and Romania. During the Middle Ages, the Latin spoken in these areas continued to change and evolved into the modern Romance languages. Today, the Romance languages form one of the two largest branches of the Indo-European language family. The most widely-spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian.
What is the language family?
Most languages belong to language families. A language family is a group of related languages that developed from a common historic ancestor, referred to as protolanguage ( proto – means ‘early’ in Greek ). The ancestral language is usually not known directly, but it is possible to discover many of its features by applying ...
What is the ancestor of the Indian language?
Similarly, Old Norse was the ancestor of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. Sanskrit was the protolanguage of many of the languages of the Indian subcontinent, such as Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu. Further back in time, all these ancestral languages descended, in turn, from one common ancestor.
What languages did the Roman Empire use?
When the Roman Empire broke up, these regional dialects evolved into the modern Romance languages that we know today: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and others. These languages form the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family.
How many languages are there in the world?
There are 6,523 languages in this group, and together they account for close to 95 percent of all world languages (assuming that there are some 6,900 languages in the world). The remaining families account for only 5 percent of the world languages. In addition, there are 53 languages considered unclassified.
What language group is water in?
It is clear that the word for ‘water’ looks very similar within each group, but not quite as similar across groups. Languages in the first group belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family . Languages in the second group belong to the Slavic branch.
Why is it so easy to learn Romance languages?
The case with Romance languages is unusually easy because their common ancestor — Latin — left many written documents. In most cases, however, the ancestral language was not written. As a result, linguists look at similarities among its modern descendants to establish common origins. Take a look at these examples:
What is the Romance language?
Let us look at the Romance languages. We know that Italian is a descendant of Latin, a language that was spoken in Italy two thousand years ago, and one which left a great number of written documents. The Roman conquest helped spread Latin throughout Europe where it eventually developed into regional dialects.
What languages are spoken in Sino-Tibetan?
Sino-Tibetan includes both the Sinitic and the Tibeto-Burman languages. Tibeto-Burman comprises hundreds of languages besides Tibetan and Burmese, spread over a vast geographical area (China, India, the Himalayan region, peninsular SE Asia). Read more. Hokkien is the oldest Sinitic language alive today.
What language family is Indo-European?
Indo European Language Family. As far back as 18th century it was suggested that similarities among languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and others were so striking as to suggest that they had sprung from a common Proto-Indo-European language.
What language is branched off Germanic?
By the 19th century, August Schleicher’s Family Tree had been proposed to model the relationships among the Indo-European languages as the branches of a tree. English is branched off Germanic. The picture below shows how the Indo European Language Family tree branch comes from the main mother tongue trunk.
How many languages are spoken in the world?
There are thousands of spoken languages in the world and most can be traced back in history to show how they are related to each other.
What are the three main languages?
There are three main language families: Indo-European (Includes English) Sino-Tibetan (Includes Chinese) Afro-Asiatic (Includes Arabic) Indo-European is the largest language family, followed by Sino-Tibetan, and lastly Afro-Asiatic. The Language Tree below shows languages that come from the same origin. (sorry about the quality.
Is Hokkien the oldest Sinitic language?
Hokkien is the oldest Sinitic language alive today. It provides an invaluable resource for scholars of ancient Chinese as well as comparative Sino-Tibetan. Mandarin and other Chinese dialects such as Cantonese have gone through the “middle Chinese” phase, Hokkien did not. She is a direct descendant of old Chinese. Read more
Which language family has the most speakers?
Sino-Tibetan is one of the largest language families in the world, with more first-language speakers than even Indo-European. The more than 1.1 billion speakers of Sinitic (the Chinese dialects) constitute the world’s largest speech community. Sino-Tibetan includes both the Sinitic and the Tibeto-Burman languages.
Indo-European
Afro-Asiatic
| FAMILY NAME | LANGUAGES | CURRENT SPEAKERS [6] | LOCATION |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atlantic–Congo languages | 1,453 | 500,000,000 | Africa |
| Mande languages | 50 | 27,003,000 | Africa |
| Kru languages | 38 | 3,800,000 | Africa |
| Dogon languages | 19 | 630,820 | Africa |
| Ijoid languages | 10 | 3,221,650 | Africa |
| Songhay languages | 11 | 3,228,000 | Africa |
| Saharan languages | 10 | 10,940,500 | Africa |
| Fur languages | 2 | 786,900 | Africa |
Niger-Congo
Austronesian
- Afro-Asiatic, also known as Afrasian (formerly Hamito-Semitic, Semito-Hamitic, or Erythraean languages), is a language family spoken in northern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and some islands and surrounding areas in Western Asia. Today, 250 million people speak approximately 250 Afro-Asian languages. Proto-Afro-Asiatic is believed to be the ancestral dialect from which a…
Sino-Tibetan
- In terms of geographical distribution through most of Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of speakers, and the number of languages, the Niger-Congo language family is one of the largest globally and the largest in Africa. The Niger-Congo language family includes almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most commonly spoken languages. About 600 million people (85 percent of th…
Trans-New Guinea
- From Madagascar to Easter Island, from Taiwan and Hawai’i to New Zealand, the Austronesian language family extends halfway worldwide. Except for indigenous Papuan and Australian languages, the family encompasses the majority of languages spoken on Pacific islands. Austronesian is one of the world’s largest and most geographically diverse language families, wi…
Interested to Learn More About Other Languages?
- One of the world’s largest language families is Sino-Tibetan. In terms of speakers, it is second only to the Indo-European language family. There are 403 strongly differentiated languages in the family, with a large geographical range (South Asia, East Asia, North Asia, South-East Asia), great linguistic difficulty, and a long history. The ancestra...
What Are Language Families?
- The Trans-New Guinea family of languages is a diverse group of Papuan languages spoken in New Guinea and surrounding islands, probably the world’s third-largest by the number of languages. Trans-New Guinea is considered to be descended from Proto-Trans New Guinea. Around 3 million people speak the languages of this language family. There are approximately 4…
How Do We Know Which Languages Belong to Which Languages?
- After reading about those largest language families in the world, you may start wondering about the similarities between the languages within some language families. Let’s fulfill your curiosity by start to learn other languages in LingoTalk! We provide you with ten languages to learnwith certified tutors, flexible schedules, and easy access!
Learn About Specific Language Families
