What is the 1st and 2nd largest language family?

Based on speaker count, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan are the largest two language families, with over 4.6 billion speakers between them.

Which 2 language families have more than 1 billion people?

Language families by speakers

Language family Approx. # of speakers % of world population
1. Indo-European 2.562 billion 44.78%
2. Sino-Tibetan 1.276 billion 22.28%
3. Niger-Congo 358 million 6.26%
4. Afro-Asiatic 340 million 5.93%

What are the 3 largest language families spoken in Europe?

Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language; within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic with more than 200 million speakers each, between them accounting for close to 90% of Europeans.

What are the largest languages?

The most spoken languages in the world

  • English (1.132 million speakers)
  • Mandarin (1.117 million speakers)
  • Spanish (534 million speakers)
  • French (280 million speakers)
  • Arabic (274 million speakers)
  • Russian (258 million speakers)
  • Portuguese (234 million speakers)

How many types of language families are there?

According to Ethnologue there are 7,139 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A “living language” is simply one that is currently used as the primary form of communication of a group of people.

What is the 2nd most spoken language in the world?

Mandarin
2. Mandarin (1.117 million speakers) When native and non-native speakers are added together, Mandarin is the second most spoken language in the world.

Is Latin a proto language?

Some universally accepted proto-languages are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and Spanish.

What are the 2 main language families of Europe?

The Language s of Europe There are three main language families in Europe. The largest is the Indo-European language family, with six sub-families represented in Europe. The second is the Finno-Ugric family, with three languages represented in Northeast Europe and eastern Europe.

What are the two international languages?

There are 6 international languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.

What is the second-largest language family?

With over 1.5 billion speakers, the Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest language group, after the Indo-European one.

What are the three major language families?

By finding patterns like these, different languages can be grouped together as members of a language family. There are three main language families: Indo-European (Includes English) Sino-Tibetan (Includes Chinese) Afro-Asiatic (Includes Arabic)

What is the oldest language family?

Proto-Afro-Asiatic is the oldest language family we can confidently hypothesize, and attempt to reconstruction although that is much more difficult than with Proto-Indo-European for example. Proto-Afro-Asiatic is about 15,000 years old.

What are the language families?

Language families are groups of languages that are related to each other because they come from a common older language. The languages in such a family are similar in their vocabulary or structure. For example, French and Spanish both come from Latin.