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This list only includes primary language families that are accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics; for language families that are not accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics, see the article "List of proposed language families".
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.
15 paź 2023 · Learn about the 14 major language families, their origins and evolution, and the ancestry of historical and modern languages from around the world.
22 lip 2020 · What Are Language Families? A language family, like any other family, is best thought of as a tree. The idea is that there is one single language — the trunk — that all the members of the language family grew out of. The concept of branches is also useful because usually these new languages form by splitting off from each other.
Catalogue of languages and families. Glottolog provides a comprehensive catalogue of the world's languages, language families and dialects. It assigns a unique and stable identifier (the Glottocode) to (in principle) all languoids, i.e. all families, languages, and dialects.
The chart below shows the relations among some of the languages in the Indo-European family. Though you wouldn’t think to look at the tangle of lines and arrows, the chart is very much simplified: many languages and even whole language families are left out.
Explore the historical relationships between languages and how they descend from a common ancestral proto-language. See the magnificent tree that captures the connections between groups of languages, with English, Spanish, and Hindi as the largest groups.
