" A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language."
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family.
Language Typology: Study of language types and their variations across languages.
Sound Changes: The phonetic changes that occur in languages over time.
Cognates: Words from different languages that share a common ancestor.
Genetic Classification: The grouping of languages based on their genetic relationships.
Comparative Method: A method of language reconstruction based on the comparison of related languages.
Reconstruction: The process of reconstructing a proto-language from its descendant languages.
Phylogenetics: The study of the evolutionary history of languages.
Indo-European Family: One of the largest language families, including over 400 languages spoken in Europe, Asia, and parts of the Middle East.
Afro-Asiatic Family: A language family spoken in North Africa and the Middle East.
Sino-Tibetan Family: A language family spoken in East Asia, including Chinese and many Tibetan and Burmese languages.
Dravidian Family: A language family spoken in South India and Sri Lanka.
Altaic Family: A language family spoken in Central Asia and parts of East Asia.
Uralic Family: A language family spoken in Northern Europe and Asia, including Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.
Austronesian Family: A language family spoken in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, including Indonesian and Hawaiian.
Austroasiatic Family: A language family spoken in Southeast Asia.
Niger-Congo Family: One of the largest language families in Africa, including widely spoken languages like Swahili and Zulu.
Afroasiatic Family: A language family spoken in North Africa and the Middle East.
Mayan Family: A language family spoken in Central America.
Eskimo-Aleut Family: A language family spoken in Alaska and parts of Siberia.
Indo-Aryan Sub-Family: A sub-family of the Indo-European family spoken in South Asia, including Hindi and Bengali.
Romance Sub-Family: A sub-family of the Indo-European family spoken in Europe, including Spanish, Italian, and French.
Germanic Sub-Family: A sub-family of the Indo-European family spoken in Europe, including English and German.
Slavic Sub-Family: A sub-family of the Indo-European family spoken in Eastern Europe, including Russian and Polish.
Celtic Sub-Family: A sub-family of the Indo-European family spoken in the British Isles and parts of Europe.
Balto-Slavic Sub-Family: A sub-family of the Indo-European family spoken in Eastern Europe, including Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian.
Afro-Asiatic: A large family of languages spoken in North Africa and Southwest Asia that is characterized by the use of consonantal roots and is known for its Semitic branch (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew).
Austronesian: A group of languages spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Indian Ocean regions, including Indonesian, Malay, and Tagalog.
Austroasiatic: A family of languages spoken in Southeast Asia, including Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon-Khmer.
Dravidian: A language family spoken mainly in South India and Sri Lanka, including Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.
Indo-European: A massive family of languages spoken from Europe to South Asia and beyond, including English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and many others.
Japonic: A language family spoken mainly in Japan, including Japanese, Ryukyuan, and Ainu.
Kartvelian: A family of languages spoken in the Caucasus region, including Georgian, Mingrelian, and Svan.
Koreanic: A language family consisting only of Korean.
Niger-Congo: A family of languages spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, including Swahili, Yoruba, and Bantu languages.
Sino-Tibetan: A family of languages spoken in East and Southeast Asia, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese.
Uralic: A family of languages spoken mainly in northern Eurasia, including Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian.
Drongo: A family of languages spoken mainly in South Asia, including Austroasiatic, Indo-European, and Sino-Tibetan.
"Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related."
"The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation."
"The language families with the most speakers are the Indo-European family" and "the Sino-Tibetan family."
"A language family may contain any number of languages."
"Some languages, termed isolates, are not known to be related to any other languages and therefore constitute a family consisting of only one language."
"Genealogically related languages can be identified by their shared retentions."
"Shared retentions are systematic similarities that cannot be explained as due to chance or effects of language contact."
"Some sets of languages may in fact be derived from a common ancestor but have diverged enough from each other that their relationship is no longer detectable."
"Some languages have not been studied in enough detail to be classified, and therefore their family membership is unknown."
"According to Ethnologue, there are 7,151 living human languages."
"Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families."
"Membership of languages in a language family is established by research in comparative linguistics."
"They share systematic similarities that cannot be explained as due to chance or to effects of language contact."
"Different regional dialects of the proto-language spoken by different speech communities undergo different language changes and thus become distinct languages from each other."
"The Indo-European family includes many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali)."
"The term 'family' reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree."
"The Sino-Tibetan family has many speakers, mainly due to the many speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China."
"Some languages, termed isolates, are not known to be related to any other languages and therefore constitute a family consisting of only one language."
"The paragraph mentions the Indo-European family, the Sino-Tibetan family, the Austronesian family, the Niger-Congo family, and isolates."