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The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal features , tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure.
The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia, such as Chinese, Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Tamil or Telugu, have a long history as a written language.
This article is a list of language families. This list only includes primary language families that are accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics ; for language families that are not accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics, see the article " List of proposed language families ".
By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian.
The Scythian languages, that belonged to the Northern Eastern Iranian languages subgroup, were the ones with the biggest geographical distribution, they were spoken in most of the steppe and desert areas of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, matching most of the western half of the Eurasian steppe, which corresponds to modern southern European ...
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic ...
The Uralic languages (/ j ʊəˈr æ l ɪ k / yoor-AL-ik), sometimes called the Uralian languages (/ j ʊəˈr eɪ l i ə n / yoor-AY-lee-ən), [3] are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for approximately 60% of speakers), Finnish, and Estonian.
According to Michael D. Larish, the languages of Southeast and East Asia descended from one proto-language (which he calls "Proto-Asian"). Japonic is grouped together with Koreanic as one branch of the Proto-Asian family. The other branch consists of the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien and Sino-Tibetan languages. [21] [22]