6/10/2023 0 Comments The study of language 4th edition![]() ![]() Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including language isolates. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali) and the Sino-Tibetan family, mainly due to the many speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. Īccording to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related. 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, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. ![]() branches are excluded.įor greater detail, see Distribution of languages on Earth.Ī 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. This map includes only primary families i.e. Contemporary distribution (2005 map) of the world's major language families (in some cases geographic groups of families). ![]()
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