Languages · Curated list
Indo-European languages, Romance languages, Slavic languages and 27 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
Most written-about first. Each description summarises the family's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
1
Language family native to Eurasia
A family of languages native to most of Europe, Greater Iran and the north of the Indian subcontinent, with further native branches in places such as Armenia and parts of the southern subcontinent, and even in mainland Southeast Asia. In the past they were also spoken in Northwestern China and Anatolia.
Wikidata · Photo: Multiple authors, first version by Mandrak, CC BY-SA 3.0
Direct descendants of Vulgar Latin
Also called the Latin languages, the languages that come directly from Vulgar Latin. They are the one surviving subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European family.
Subfamily of Indo-European languages
Also called the Slavonic languages, Indo-European languages spoken mainly by the Slavic peoples and those descended from them. They are thought to come from Proto-Slavic, a proto-language of the Early Middle Ages, itself thought to derive from the older Proto-Balto-Slavic, which ties them to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group of the Indo-European family.
Branch of the Indo-European language family
A branch of the Indo-European family, native to about 515 million people, mostly in Europe, Northern America, Oceania and Southern Africa. Its most widely spoken member, English, is also the most widely spoken language in the world, with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
Language family of Eurasia
A family of more than 35 languages on record, spoken across Eurasia by Turkic peoples, from Eastern and Southeastern Europe to Central, East, North (Siberia) and West Asia. Their homeland was an area of East Asia between Mongolia and Northwest China, the likely home of Proto-Turkic, and in the first millennium they spread from there into Central Asia and on westward.
Language family of the Andes in South America
Also called Runa simi in Southern Quechua, an indigenous family of languages that began in central Peru and then spread to other Andean countries. Descended from a common ancestor, "Proto-Quechua", no language family of the Americas from before Columbus has more speakers: an estimated 8–10 million in 2004, and a little under 7 million by the latest census figures, from up to 2011.
Large language family of Africa and West Asia
A family of about 400 languages spoken mainly in North Africa, West Asia, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. More than 500 million people speak one as their mother tongue, which makes it the fourth-largest language family, after Niger–Congo, Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European.
Branch of the Afroasiatic languages
A branch of the Afroasiatic family. It takes in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Maltese and the Modern South Arabian languages, among many other ancient and modern languages.
Language branch
A branch of the Indo-European family, descended from Proto-Celtic, a reconstructed language. Edward Lhuyd first used the word Celtic for this group of languages in 1707, after Paul-Yves Pezron, who explicitly linked the Celts of classical writers with the Breton and Welsh languages.
10
Family of languages and dialects Indigenous to North Africa
A branch of the Afroasiatic family made up of closely related languages, which Berber communities, the indigenous peoples of North Africa, speak.
Language family of northern Eurasia
Sometimes called the Uralian languages, a family of languages native to northern Eurasia. Its biggest members by number of native speakers are Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian.
Large language family mostly of Southeast Asia and the Pacific
A family of languages spoken across Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Madagascar and the Pacific islands, by about 386 million people.
Branch of the Indo-European language family
Also called the Indo-Iranic or Aryan languages, the biggest branch of the Indo-European family. It has over 300 languages and about 1.7 billion speakers around the world, mainly in South Asia, West Asia and parts of Central Asia.
Language family native to Asia
A family of over 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in its number of native speakers; about 1.4 billion people speak one of them.
Group of Germanic languages
A close-knit group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisians, who live along the southern edge of the North Sea in Germany and the Netherlands. Their nearest living relatives are the Anglic languages; the two groups together form the Anglo-Frisian languages, and with the Low German dialects they make up the North Sea Germanic languages.
16
Branch of the Indo-Iranian languages
A branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, in the Indo-European family. Early in the 21st century they had 800 million speakers, mostly east of the Indus River in South Asia: in Eastern Pakistan, Northern India, southern Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Wikidata · Photo: BishkekRocks, CC BY-SA 3.0
Language family
A language family with 250 million speakers. Most live in South India; others are in parts of North India, in Nepal and Bangladesh, in the north-east of Sri Lanka and the south-west of Pakistan, and in small communities in Afghanistan and Iran.
Convergence zone and proposed language family
Also called the Altaic sprachbund, a sprachbund of the Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic language families. It was once proposed as a language family, an idea that won support in the 20th century but that many linguists now reject, finding that the likenesses between the three are better explained by areal convergence than by common descent.
19
Branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family
Also called the Iranic languages, a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, in the Indo-European family, spoken as native languages by the Iranian peoples, mostly on the Iranian Plateau.
Large language family of Sub-Saharan Africa
A proposed family of African languages, spoken across most of sub-Saharan Africa. It brings together the Atlantic–Congo and Mande languages, and perhaps several smaller groups that are hard to classify.
Disputed subdivision of the Uralic languages
A traditional grouping of every language in the Uralic family except the Samoyedic ones. Its once widely accepted standing as a subfamily of Uralic rests on criteria set out in the 19th century, and linguists of today, such as Ante Aikio and Tapani Salminen, criticise it.
Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people
Also written Sami or Saami in English, a group of Uralic languages of Northern Europe, spoken by the Sámi, an indigenous people. Depending on how they are divided, there are ten or more.
Branch of the Indo-European language family
A branch of the Indo-European family with some 6.5–7.0 million speakers, native or second-language, mostly living east and southeast of Europe's Baltic Sea. With the Slavic languages they make up the Balto-Slavic branch of the family.
Language family of the Arctic and sub-Arctic
Also called Eskimo–Aleut or Inuit–Yupik–Unangan, a family of languages native to the north of North America and a small part of northeastern Asia. Its languages are indigenous to parts of the United States (Alaska); of Canada, including Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, northern Quebec (Nunavik) and northern Labrador (Nunatsiavut); of Greenland; and of the Russian Far East.
Language family concentrated in Southeast Asia
A large family of languages spoken across Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. Most people in Cambodia and Vietnam speak one natively, as do minorities scattered across parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal and southern China.
Large language family spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa
About 600 languages spoken by the Bantu peoples of Central, Southern, Eastern and Southeast Africa, forming either a family of their own or a branch within Niger-Congo, if that family is accepted. They are the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
Branch of the Indo-European language family
A branch of the Indo-European family; its oldest known languages were spoken in the Italian Peninsula during the first millennium BC. Of its ancient members Latin mattered most, as the official language of ancient Rome; before the common era, Rome had conquered the rest of the Italic peoples.
Languages of the Nordic countries
A branch of the Germanic languages, which are a sub-family of Indo-European; the other two branches are West Germanic and the extinct East Germanic. They are also called the Nordic languages, a direct rendering of the term most used by Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Danish scholars and speakers.
Group of languages
The biggest of the Germanic family's three branches, within the Indo-European languages. It is traditionally split into three: North Sea Germanic, with English, Scots, the Low German and the Frisian languages; Weser–Rhine Germanic, with Dutch and its close relatives; and Elbe Germanic, with German and its close relatives and varieties.
Language family
One of the Slavic languages' three regional subgroups, the others being West and South Slavic. They are spoken natively across Eastern Europe and eastward into Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Every Wikidata item that is a language family, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 30 are shown.
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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