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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 metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy .
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".
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the languages of the northern Indian subcontinent, the overwhelming majority of Europe, and the Iranian plateau. Some European languages of this family— English , French , Portuguese , Russian , Dutch , and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now ...
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin [1] or Neo-Latin [2] languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. [3] They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are:
The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. [137] This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu).
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic , Amharic , Tigrinya , Aramaic , Hebrew , Maltese and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia , North Africa , [ a ] the Horn of Africa , [ b ] [ c ] Malta , [ d ] and in large ...
The Celtic languages (/ ˈ k ɛ l t ɪ k / KEL-tik) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from Proto-Celtic. [1] The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, [2] following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the ...