Language Families

The roughly seven thousand languages spoken today group, by shared descent, into a few dozen families. Each branch below gathers tongues that trace back to one ancestral speech.

from Human Language

The world's largest family by speakers, descended from a single prehistoric tongue once spoken on the Eurasian steppe. It spread from Europe to India in many great branches.

from Indo-European

The branch of English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian tongues. Carried worldwide by trade and empire, English became the first truly global lingua franca.

from Indo-European

The daughters of Latin — Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian — spread by Rome and later by colonisation across the Americas and beyond.

from Indo-European

The East, West, and South Slavic tongues of Eastern Europe and Russia, including Russian, Polish, Czech, and Serbian — many written in the Cyrillic script.

from Indo-European

The easternmost and most populous branch — Sanskrit's heirs in India (Hindi, Bengali, Urdu) and the Iranian tongues (Persian, Kurdish, Pashto).

from Indo-European

Essentially Greek alone, but with the longest documented history of any Indo-European tongue — the language of Homer, philosophy, and the New Testament.

from Indo-European

Once spread across much of Europe, now surviving on its Atlantic fringe — Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton, kept alive by revival movements.

from Indo-European

A small branch of just Lithuanian and Latvian, prized by linguists because Lithuanian preserves archaic features close to the reconstructed Indo-European parent.

from Human Language

The family of Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese and hundreds of related tongues. Chinese alone, with over a billion speakers, is the world's most spoken first language.

from Human Language

Spanning North Africa and the Middle East, this family includes the Semitic tongues (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic) as well as ancient Egyptian and the Berber languages.

from Human Language

Probably the largest family by number of languages, covering most of sub-Saharan Africa. Its Bantu sub-group alone — Swahili, Zulu, Shona — spans the continent's south.

from Human Language

Carried by seafarers across half the globe, from Madagascar to Easter Island — Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, Hawaiian, and the Polynesian tongues.

from Human Language

A northern Eurasian family of Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and the Sámi tongues — non-Indo-European islands amid Europe's Indo-European sea.

from Human Language

The languages of southern India — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam — older in the subcontinent than the Indo-Iranian tongues that later spread from the north.

from Human Language

A closely knit family stretching from Turkey across Central Asia to Siberia — Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Uyghur among the largest.

from Human Language

Japanese (with the Ryukyuan tongues) and Korean each form small, largely isolated families, their deeper kinship still debated by linguists.

from Human Language

Tongues with no known relatives at all, such as Basque in Europe — living reminders of how many ancient language families have vanished without a trace.