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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.
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 ".
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. Linguists thus ...
Lyle Campbell (2012) proposed the following list of 53 uncontroversial indigenous language families and 55 isolates of South America – a total of 108 independent families and isolates. [14] Language families with 9 or more languages are highlighted in bold. The remaining language families all have 6 languages or fewer.
Language families of the world Isoglosses of Faroese on the Faroe Islands, part of the Kingdom of Denmark. A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas.
Looking at families rather than individual languages, he found a rate of 30% of families/protolanguages in North America, all on the western flank, compared to 5% in South America and 7% of non-American languages – though the percentage in North America, and especially the even higher number in the Pacific Northwest, drops considerably if ...
The following is a list of proposed language families, which connect established families into larger genetic groups (macro-families). Support for these proposals vary from case to case. Support for these proposals vary from case to case.
Below is a list of South American language families and isolates grouped by geographic region. The inventory of language families and isolates is partly based on Campbell (2012). [8] Each region is higlighted in bold, while language isolates and individual languages are highlighted in italics.