Languages are classified into 9 main groups according to phonetic, grammatical or vocabulary analogies.

1 The Indo-European Language Group

It goes from India to Europe and includes languages as diverse as Latin, Celtic, Indian, Slavic, Germanic, Persian, Greek,… All these languages may seem very different and yet they are closer to each other than to the languages of other groups! This group represents about half of the world’s population.

2 The Asian Language Group

The languages in this group have in common that they have a phonetic system where tone is essential. It contains several dozen languages, including Chinese, and represents a quarter of the world’s population.

3 The Finno-Ugric Ural-Altaic group

It contains Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish languages… and also Japanese and Korean!

4 The Malayo-Polynesian group (Austronesian languages)

It contains the languages of Indonesia and the Philippines as well as Malagasy.

5 The Semitic-Chamitic group

In addition to Arabic and Hebrew, this group also contains Berber and Ethiopian languages and Somali.

6 The Dravidian group

All languages spoken in southern India, like Tamil for example.

7 The Bantu language group

These are the languages spoken in Black Africa south of a Cameroon / Kenya line.

The languages that are not classified in these major groups are Black African languages that are related to Bantu languages.

8 The Amerindian Language group

These are the Indian languages of America that have great similarities with the Finno-Ugric (agglutinating) languages. This is not so surprising because the languages of Siberia belong to the latter and the settlement of the Americas was mainly through the passage of the Behring Strait.

9 Papuan and Australian languages

Spoken in Australia and the western Pacific Ocean.

More information on parent languages in this article!

Les familles de langues

Image source:
 https://www.freelang.com/familles/cartes_langues.php