A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term comes from the Tree model of language origination in historical linguistics , which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree.
There are 6.800 known languages spoken in the 200 countries of the world. 2.261 have writing systems (the others are only spoken).
· Classification of Languages
This is a list of the top ten families that are fairly often recognized as phylogenetic units, in terms of numbers of native speakers as a proportion of world population, listed with their core geographic areas.
- Indo-European languages 46% (Europe, Southwest to South Asia, North Asia, North America, South America, Oceania)
- Sino-Tibetan languages 21% (East Asia)
- Niger-Congo languages 6.4% (Sub-Saharan Africa)
- Afro-Asiatic languages 6.0% (North Africa to Horn of Africa, Southwest Asia)
- Austronesian languages 5.9% (Oceania, Madagascar, maritime Southeast Asia)
- Dravidian languages 3.7% (South Asia)
- Altaic languages 2.3% (Central Asia, Northern Asia, Anatolia, Siberia)
- Japonic languages 2.1% (Japan)
- Austro-Asiatic languages 1.7% (mainland Southeast Asia)
- Tai-Kadai languages 1.3% (Southeast Asia)
