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A language family is a group of related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists thus describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different of the proto-language undergoing different and thus becoming distinct languages over time.
One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages, including Spanish language, French language, Italian language, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan language, Romansh language, and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin.Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2013. The Romance family itself is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia, all believed to have descended from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European.
A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Conversely, there is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages, contain over 1,000.
Language families can be identified from characteristics shared amongst their languages. are one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through the comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact, which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic, Tungusic, and Turkic languages share many similarities that have led several scholars to believe Altaic languages. These supposed relationships were later discovered (in the view of most scholars) to be derived through language contact and thus they are not related through shared ancestry. Eventually though, intense language contact with other language families, and inconsistent changes within the original language family, will obscure inherited characteristics and make it virtually impossible to deduce earlier relationships; even the oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic, is far younger than language itself.
Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists the following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world; while Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than Sign language, Pidgin, and unclassifiable languages):
| {class="wikitable col2right" | +Ethnologue 27
!Family!!No. of languages |
| 1,552 | |
| 1,256 | |
| 481 | |
| 458 | |
| 454 | |
| 384 | |
| 382 | |
| 210 | |
| 179 | |
| 167 | |
| 91 | |
| 85 |
| +Glottolog 5.0
!Family!!No. of languages |
| 1,410 |
| 1,274 |
| 586 |
| 514 |
| 381 |
| 316 |
| 250 |
| 181 |
| 158 |
| 95 |
| 85 |
| 77 |
Neither Ethnologue nor Glottolog list the language families of . Of sign language families, the Francosign family, hosting around 70 languages, is by far the largest and most widespread.
The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population.
There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion).
In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance, the Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family, since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of the comparative method of linguistic analysis.
In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out the possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having Loanword the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and Loanword have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words, the remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related.
Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from a single language and have no single ancestor.
Language isolate are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family—a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque language, which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On the global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates.Cf. Language families, Glottolog.
Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, and groups into complexes. A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language.
The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods.
Further, a speech variety may either be considered as a language or as a dialect, depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within a Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family.
A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship is found with any other known language.
A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier. For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language, spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In the latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family.
The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to the tree model. The wave model uses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages.
Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with the language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan language, Umbrian language, etc.) might well be "". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not a linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic, Baltic languages and Slavic languages that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family.
Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for the purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgins. Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate the other language.
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