List of language families
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This set of lists of language families also includes language isolates, unclassified languages and other types.
Language families
In the following, each bullet item is a known or suspected language family.
Language isolates
Language isolates are languages which are not part of any known family and they can be alternatively described as being its sole representative.
Baredina
Miraria
Unclassified languages
Languages are considered unclassified either because, for one reason or another, little effort has been made to compare them with other languages or more commonly, because they are too poorly documented to permit reliable classification: most such languages are extinct and, most likely, will never be known well enough to classify.
Extinct families and unclassified languages
This section lists extinct languages and families which have no known living relatives; while a minority of these is well known but still classified as genetically independent, the lack of attestation makes many of these hard to put into larger groups.
Other language classifications
The classification of languages into families, assumes that all of them develop from a single parent proto-language and evolve over time into different daughter language(s). While the vast majority of tongues fit this description fairly well, there are exceptions. A mixed language often refers to a particular combination of existing ones, which may stem from different families: a pidgin is a simple language used for communication between groups; this may involve simplification and/or mixing of multiple languages. When a pidgin develops into a more stable language which children learn from birth, it is usually called a "creole."
Sign languages
The family relationships of sign languages are not well established due to a lagging in linguistic research, and many are isolates.