Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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".
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 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 ...
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]
Almost 3 billion native speakers use Indo-European languages, [web 5] making them by far the largest language family. Of the 20 world languages with the largest numbers of native speakers, twelve are Indo-European – Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Punjabi, Marathi, French, Urdu, and Italian – accounting for ...
Languages of the Austronesian family are today spoken by about 386 million people (4.9% of the global population), making it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay (around 250–270 million in Indonesia alone in its own literary standard, named Indonesian ), Javanese , and Filipino ...
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Donate
The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. [1] [2] The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions.