1. Indo-European language:
The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. The most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Persian and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the human population speaks an Indo-European language natively, by far the highest of any language family.
The Indo-European family includes most of the modern languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central, and South Asia. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia (present-day central and eastern Turkey), the ancient Tarim Basin (present-day Northwest China) and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations and Mongol invasions. With written evidence appearing since the Bronze Age in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the second-longest recorded history, after the Afro-asiatic family.
All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Although no written records remain, aspects of the culture and religion of the Proto-Indo-European people can also be reconstructed from the related cultures of ancient and modern Indo-European speakers who continue to live in areas to where the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from their original homeland. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other major language families.
2. Sino-Tibetan language:
The Sino-Tibetan languages, in a few sources also known as Tibeto-Burman or Trans-Himalayan, are a family of more than 400 languages spoken in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The family is second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers. The Sino-Tibetan languages with the most native speakers are the varieties of Chinese (1.3 billion speakers), Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (8 million). Many Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by small communities in remote mountain areas and as such are poorly documented.
Several low-level groupings are well established, but the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. Although the family is often presented as divided into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated, and is rejected by an increasing number of researchers.
3. Indigenous languages of the Americas:
Also called Amerindian language are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families, as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages.
Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made, such as Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis. This scheme is rejected by nearly all specialists. According to UNESCO, most of the indigenous American languages in North America are critically endangered, and many are already extinct. The most widely spoken indigenous language is Southern Quechua, with about 6 to 7 million speakers, primarily in South America.
4. The Caucasian language:
The Caucasian languages are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Linguistic comparison allows these languages to be classified into several language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred to as a family of languages.
5. The Australian Aboriginal language:
The Australian Aboriginal languages consist of up to twenty-seven language families and isolates, spoken by Aboriginal Australians of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. The relationships between these languages are not clear at present. Despite this uncertainty the indigenous languages of Australia are collectively covered by the technical term "Australian languages". By convention, these do not include the Tasmanian languages or the eastern Torres Strait language Meriam Mer.
In the late 18th century, there were about 250 distinct Aboriginal social groupings, and a similar number of languages or varieties. At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remain in daily use and all except only 13 are highly endangered. The surviving languages are located in the most isolated areas.
6. The Austroasiatic language:
The Austroasiatic languages, in recent classifications synonymous with Mon–Khmer, are a large language family of continental Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the southern border of China. The name Austroasiatic comes from the Latin words for "south" and "Asia", hence "South Asia". Of these languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have a long-established recorded history, and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status as modern national languages (in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively). On the subnational level, Khasi has official status in Meghalaya while Santali, Ho and Mundari are official languages of Jharkhand. In Myanmar, the Wa language is the de facto official language of Wa State. The rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.
7. The Dravidian language:
The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central India, as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka with small pockets in southwestern Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live beyond the mainstream communities, such as the Kurukh and Gond tribes.
Though some argue that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier, the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India.
8. The Niger–Congo language:
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. It may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question is complicated by ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language.
It is the third largest language family in the world by number of native speakers. One of the characteristics common to most Niger–Congo languages is the use of a noun class system. The most widely spoken Niger–Congo languages by number of native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Shona and Zulu. The most widely spoken by number of speakers is Swahili.
9. The Nilo-Saharan language:
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million Nilotic people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east.
As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile basin and the central Sahara desert. Eight of its proposed constituent divisions (excluding Kunama, Kuliak, and Songhay) are found in the modern two nations of Sudan and South Sudan, through which the Nile River flows.
10. Eskimo–Aleut or Eskaleut:
The Eskimo–Aleut or Eskaleut is a language family native to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic (Nunavut and Inuvialuit Settlement Region), Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, Greenland, and the Chukchi Peninsula on the eastern tip of Siberia. It is also known as Eskaleutian, Eskaleutic, or Inuit–Yupik-Unangan. The Eskimo–Aleut language family is divided into two branches, the Eskimo languages and the Aleut language.
The Aleut language family consists of a single language, Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands and the Pribilof Islands. Aleut is divided into several dialects.
The Eskimo languages are divided into two branches, the Yupik languages, spoken in western and southwestern Alaska and in easternmost Siberia, and the Inuit languages, spoken in northern Alaska, in Canada, and in Greenland. Inuit, which covers a huge range of territory, is divided into several varieties. Neighbouring varieties are quite similar, although those at the farthest distances from the centre in the Diomede Islands and East Greenland are quite divergent.
Compiled by: Ghanashyam Deka
Comments
Post a Comment