Languanologue # 4

In this series, we will now look at facts on Language Families for the next 3 days Today we will start with a short fact on Language Families.

There are about 300 or more (it is disputed) language families in the world, classified and distributed in a very big list in a complicated way. As of early 2009, SIL Ethonologue catalogued 6,909 living human languages. Languages can be Living, Dead, Distinct from dead or simply, Extinct. I have made an attempt to simplify language classification in this short subseries of 3 days. Every level of language relationship is commonly called a Language family, to simplify matters a "Language Family" is a group of languages related by descent from an ancestor. Without complicating matters, for the next 2 days of this series we will simply see 2 lists of the top ten families in terms of numbers of native speakers as a proportion of world population and the largest language families in terms of number of languages. More on languages tomorrow.....