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Language Family

Linguists divide the languages of the world, past and present, into various language families. Languages within a family share numerous cognates, and it is theorized that thousands of years ago the member languages had a common ancestor, a hypothetical protolanguage. There are ongoing attempts to prove relations between the different families.

List of some language families

Language FamilyExample Languages
Afro-AsiaticArabic, Hebrew, Hausa, Somali
AltaicTurkish, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese
Austro-AsiaticVietnamese, Khmer
AustronesianIndonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Hawaiian
CaucasianGeorgian, Chechen
DravidianTamil, Telugu, Malayalam
Indo-EuropeanEnglish, Irish, Spanish, German, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi
Niger-CongoSwahili, Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Zulu
Nilo-SaharanKanuri, Luo
Sino-TibetanMandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese
UralicFinnish, Hungarian, Estonian
Native American languages span over several different families, as do Australian Aboriginal languages

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