Discover the World's Language Families

Overview of Language Families

• A language family is a group of languages that are related through a common ancestral language or proto-language.
• There are approximately 7,151 living languages in the world, distributed among 142 different language families.
• The Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families have the most speakers.
• Linguists identify 406 independent language families, including language isolates.
• Membership in a language family is established by research in comparative linguistics.
• Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, known as branches of the family.
• Language isolates are languages that have no known relatives or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed.
• A proto-language is the root from which all languages in a family stem from.
• A sprachbund is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures.
• Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages, such as pidgins.
• Language contact can also lead to cultural divisions and territorialism.
• The linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry show a remarkably similar pattern, verified statistically.