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:
- Indo-European Language Family - 3.2 billion estimated speakers - English, Spanish, Hindi
- Sino-Tibetan Language Family - 1.4 billion - Mandarin Chinese
- Atlantic-Congo and Niger-Congo Language Family - 500 million - Swahili, Yoruba
- Afroasiatic Language Family - 500 million - Arabic
- Austronesian Language Family - 325 million - Malay, Tagalog
- Dravidian Language Family - 250 million - Telegu, Tamil
- Turkic Language Family - 180 million - Turkic, Uzbek
- Japonic Language Family - 130 million - Japanese
- Austroasiatic Language Family - 115 million - Vietnamese, Khmer
- Koreanic Language Family - 77 million - Korean
We donāt 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 languageās use far predates writing and leaves no physical evidence, so we might never know for sure.