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.

Language Family	Example Languages
Afro-Asiatic	Arabic, Hebrew, Hausa, Somali
Altaic (?)	Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese
Austro-Asiatic	Vietnamese, Khmer
Austronesian	Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Hawaiian
Dravidian	Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam
Indo-European	English, Irish, Spanish, German, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi
Kartvelian	Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan
Niger-Congo	Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Zulu
Nilo-Saharan	Kanuri, Luo
Sino-Tibetan	Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese
Tai-Kadai	Thai, Lao, Zhuang
Uralic	Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian

Some groupings, such as the Native American languages, Australian Aboriginal languages, or Papuan languages, actually span over several different families. Since they are related only by geography, not genealogically, they are not considered true language families.