How are languages related?
Just as we use biological family trees to represent the relationships between people, we represent the relationships between languages using the concept of the language family.
A language family is a group of languages that hypothetically descend from a common ancestral or parental language, which is referred to as the proto-language of the group. We say "hypothetically" because scholars have used the linguistic reconstruction method to get to this point. They would compare terms that are most resistant to change across different languages and make attested (this is the key word) connections based on similarities. For example, scholars would compare terms such as pronouns, terms related to kinship and the body, and numbers.
How many language families are there?
Per the Linguistics Network, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of language families due to disagreements about the family classification process itself.
On one hand, scholars propose "clumping" many languages into few families.
On the other hand, some propose "splitting" languages into distinct families unless there is strong enough evidence to recognize a relationship between languages.
Ethnologue, a research center for language intelligence, counts 7,139 languages spoken around the world today and classifies them under 142 language families.
How big can language families get?
According to Ethnologue, the 6 largest language families by language count are as follows:
These same language families are the 6 largest language families by speaker count, as such:
Just as we use biological family trees to represent the relationships between people, we represent the relationships between languages using the concept of the language family.
A language family is a group of languages that hypothetically descend from a common ancestral or parental language, which is referred to as the proto-language of the group. We say "hypothetically" because scholars have used the linguistic reconstruction method to get to this point. They would compare terms that are most resistant to change across different languages and make attested (this is the key word) connections based on similarities. For example, scholars would compare terms such as pronouns, terms related to kinship and the body, and numbers.
How many language families are there?
Per the Linguistics Network, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of language families due to disagreements about the family classification process itself.
On one hand, scholars propose "clumping" many languages into few families.
On the other hand, some propose "splitting" languages into distinct families unless there is strong enough evidence to recognize a relationship between languages.
Ethnologue, a research center for language intelligence, counts 7,139 languages spoken around the world today and classifies them under 142 language families.
How big can language families get?
According to Ethnologue, the 6 largest language families by language count are as follows:
- Niger-Congo (1,535)
- Austronesian (1,225)
- Trans-New Guinea (477)
- Sino-Tibetan (455)
- Indo-European (445)
- Afro-Asiatic (371)
These same language families are the 6 largest language families by speaker count, as such:
- Indo-European (3.29 billion)
- Sino-Tibetan (1.4 billion)
- Niger-Congo (571 million)
- Afro-Asiatic (583 million)
- Austronesian (327 million)
- Trans-New Guinea (4 million)