Home > Language families and languages
LanguagesMost languages are known to belong to language families ("families" hereforth). An accurately identified family is a phylogenetic unit, i.e., all its members derive from a common ancestor. The ancestor is very seldom known to us directly, since most languages have a very short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many of the features of the common ancestor of related languages by applying the comparative method -- a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th-century linguist August Schleicher. It can demonstrate the family status of many of the groupings listed below.
Language families can be subdivided into smaller units, conventionally referred to as "branches" (because the history of a language family is often represented as a "tree" diagram).
The common ancestor of a family (or branch) is known as its "protolanguage". For example, the reconstructible protolanguage of the well-known Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European (not known from written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing). Sometimes a protolanguage can be identified with a historically known language. Thus, provincial dialects of Latin ("Vulgar Latin") gave rise to the modern Romance languages, so the Proto-Romance language is more or less identical with Latin (if not exactly with the literary Latin of the Classical writers), and dialects of Old Norse are the protolanguage to Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic.
Languages that cannot be reliably classified into any family are known as language isolates.
1 Natural languages
1.1 Major language families (grouped geographically without regard to inter-family relationship)
In the following, each "bulleted" item is a known language family. The geographic headings over them are meant solely as a tool for grouping families into collections more comprehensible than an unstructured list of the dozen or two of independent families. Geographic relationship is convenient for that purpose, but these headings are not a suggestion of any "super-families" phylogenetically relating the families named.
1.1.1 Families of Africa and southwest AsiaSouthwest Asia or West Asia is the southwestern part of Asia. Geographers that were annoyed with the ambiguity of the term "Middle East" tried to popularize the word "Southwest Asia", but with limited success. The term "West Asia" has however become the p
- Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) languagesThe Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia. Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Hamito-Semitic"
- Niger-Congo languagesThe Niger-Congo languages are probably the largest group of the world in terms of different languages. Some of the African languages with the largest number of speakers belong to it. A common property of many Niger-Congo languages is the use of a noun cla
- Nilo-Saharan languagesThe Nilo-Saharan languages are a group of African languages spoken mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including Nubia. Roughly 11 million people spoke Nilo-Saharan languages as of 1987, according to Merritt Ruhlen's estimate. The fami
- Khoisan languagesThis article is about the Khoisan language group. For the Khoisan ethnic group, see Khoisan. The Khoisan languages are the smallest phylum of African languages. Historically, they were mainly spoken by the Khoi and Bushmen people. Today they are only spok
1.1.2 Families of EuropeFor the band of the same name, see Europe (band . Europe is a continent forming the westermost part of the Eurasian supercontinent. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Se, and northNorth Asia is a subregion of Asia. It consists entirely of Siberia, which lies in the Asian part of Russia. By some definitions, not all of Siberia is part of North Asia''. See Siberia for more information''. Other subregions of Asia East Asia Southeast A, west, and south Asia
