In this episode I talk about language families – what they are, and how they develop, and I introduce some major and minor language families.
According to Wikipedia, 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”.
According to Ethnologue there are currently 142 different language families and 7,111 living languages. The ten largest languages families account for about 88% of the world’s population, and 74% of the world’s languages.
Top Ten Language Families Language FamilyNumber of languagesNumber of speakers Total5,2386,143,981,545 Niger-Congo1,526 519,814,033 Austronesian1,223325,862,510 Trans-New Guinea4783,580,507 Sino-Tibetan4531,385,995,195 Indo-European4453,237,999,904 Afro-Asiatic365499,294,669 Australian20437,032 Nilo-Saharan20053,359,610 Otomanguean1771,715,045 Austro-Asiatic167116,323,040 Here’s an illustration a the family tree of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages_(Middle-earth)
More information about language families
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/langfam.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family
https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/family
https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/language-families/
The tune featured in this episode Dancing Donkeys / Asynnod sy’n Dawnsio
See the score for this tune
Don’t forget that you can US$50 off the Polyglot Cruise 2020 by using the code OMNIGLOT.
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