languagelyon.com » Language Families http://languagelyon.com/blog www.LanguageLyon.com is a language learning website dedicated to all things language learning related. Mon, 10 May 2010 00:43:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Major Language Families http://languagelyon.com/blog/2010/01/major-language-families/ http://languagelyon.com/blog/2010/01/major-language-families/#comments Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:35:57 +0000 LYON http://languagelyon.com/blog/?p=347 Below is a list of phylogenetic units. They are the top ten languages in the world; the means of measurement is the number of native speakers as a proportion of world population, listed with their surrounding geographic regions.

  1. Indo-European languages?46% (Europe,?Southwest to?South Asia,?America,?Oceania)
  2. Sino-Tibetan languages?21% (East Asia)
  3. Niger-Congo languages?6.4% (Sub-Saharan Africa)
  4. Afro-Asiatic languages?6.0% (North Africa?to?Horn of Africa,?Southwest Asia)
  5. Austronesian languages?5.9% (Oceania,?Madagascar,?maritime Southeast Asia)
  6. Dravidian languages?3.7% (South Asia)
  7. Altaic languages?2.3% (Central Asia,?Northern Asia,?Anatolia,?Siberia)
  8. Japonic languages?2.1% (Japan)
  9. Austro-Asiatic languages?1.7% (mainland Southeast Asia)

10. Tai-Kadai languages?1.3% (Southeast Asia)

Phyla* with historically wide geographical distributions but comparatively few contemporary speakers include?Eskimo-Aleut,?Na-Den?,?Algic,?Quechuan and?Nilo-Saharan.

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