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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".
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 3 February 2025. Group of languages related through a common ancestor 2005 map of the contemporary distribution of the world's primary 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 ...
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. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
Today, Indo-European languages are spoken by billions of native speakers across all inhabited continents, [73] the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of speakers according to Ethnologue , 10 are Indo-European: English , Hindustani , Spanish , Bengali , French , Russian ...
They each contain roughly one-fifth of the world's languages. The geographical span of Austronesian was the largest of any language family in the first half of the second millennium CE, before the spread of Indo-European in the colonial period. It ranged from Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa to Easter Island in the eastern Pacific.
Instead of building the entire family tree, he set out to reconstruct a Proto-Tibeto-Burman language by comparing five major languages, with occasional comparisons with other languages. [23] He reconstructed a two-way distinction on initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial consonants that had been retained ...
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.