A language family is a classification of languages that all descend from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of the family. The ten language families with the most speakers, and examples of modern languages in the family:

We don’t quite know where language come from, but linguistic scholars generally hypothesize that it evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems. It is possible that there was a single common ancestor language spoken by the first genetically modern humans in Africa, but language’s use far predates writing and leaves no physical evidence, so we might never know for sure.