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 counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect.
Language families (non-sign)
In the following, each bullet item is a known or suspected language family. Phyla with historically wide geographical distributions but comparatively few current-day speakers include Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dené, Algic, Quechuan and Nilo-Saharan.
The geographic headings over them are meant solely as a tool for grouping families into collections, more comprehensible than an unstructured list of a few hundred independent families. Geographic relationship is convenient for that purpose, but these headings are not a suggestion of any "super-families" phylogenetically relating the families named.
| Family name | Languages | Current speakers | Location | Proposed parent family |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Afro-Asiatic languages | 366 | 380,000,000 | Africa, Asia, Europe |
Language isolates
Template:Seealso Language isolates are languages which are not part of any known family and they can be alternatively described as being its sole representants.
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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.
continent
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 is still classified as genetically independent (like the ancient Sumerian language), the lack of attestation makes many of these hard to put into larger groups.
| Name | Languages | Year of death | Location | Well-attested? | Proposed parent family |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hurro-Urartian languages | 2 | 7th century BC? | Asia | Yes | Alarodian languages |
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". Whether for ease of use or created for use in fiction, languages can also be constructed from the ground up, rather than develop from existing ones; these are known as constructed languages.
Sign languages
The family relationships of sign languages are not well established due to a lagging in linguistic research, and many are isolates.
| Family Name | Location | Number of Languages |
|---|---|---|
| French Sign | Europe, the Americas, Francophone Africa, parts of Asia | Over 50 |
Beyond these language families, there exist many isolates, including:
Proposed families
The following is a list of proposed language families, which connect established families into larger genetic groups; support for these proposals varies, the Dené–Yeniseian languages for example, are a recent proposal which has been generally well received, whereas reconstructions of the Proto-World language are often viewed as fringe science; proposals which are themselves based on other proposals, have the likelihood of their parts noted in parentheses.
| Proposed name | Description | Mainstream consensus |
|---|---|---|
| Proto-World | reconstructed common ancestor of all living languages | Widely rejected. |