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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 6 January 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 ...
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of 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.
List of sign languages by number of native signers; List of language families (with number of speakers) List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language; Number of languages by country; Languages used on the Internet; List of ISO 639-3 codes; Lists of languages; List of languages by number of ...
Lists which are global in scope (all living natural languages would classify for inclusion): by country: List of official languages by country and territory; Number of languages by country; by name: List of language names (native names) by phylogenetic relation: List of language families (phylogenetic)
Language families of the world Isoglosses of Faroese on the Faroe Islands, part of the Kingdom of Denmark. A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language, or language family. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas.
In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue , with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.
Eight of the top ten biggest languages, by number of native speakers, are Indo-European. One of these languages, English, is the de facto world lingua franca, with an estimate of over one billion second language speakers. Indo-European language family has 10 known branches or subfamilies, of which eight are living and two are extinct. Most of ...