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The ten language families

- The Indo-European Family- The most widely studied family of languages and the family with the largest number of speakers. Languages include English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Greek, Hindi, Bengali; and the classical languages of Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian.
- The Uralic Family- A family found in Europe (Hungarian, Finnish) and Siberia (Mordvin) with complex noun structures.
- The Altaic Family- A family spread from Europe (Turkish) through Central Asia (Uzbek), Mongolia (Mongolian), to the Far East (Korean, Japanese). These languages have the interesting property of vowel harmony.
- The Sino-Tibetan Family- An important Asian family of languages that includes the world's most spoken language, Mandarin. These languages are monosyllabic and tonal.
- The Malayo-Polynesian Family- A family consisting of over 1000 languages spread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well South East Asia. Languages include Malay, Indonesian, Maori and Hawaiian.
- The Afro-Asiatic Family- This family contains languages of northern Africa and the Middle East. The dominant languages are Arabic and Hebrew.
- The Caucasian Family- A family based around the Caucas Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Georgian and Chechen are the main languages. They are known for their large number of consonants.
- The Dravidian Family- The languages of southern India (in contrast to the Indo-European languages of northern India). Tamil is the best known of these languages.
- Austro-Asiatic Family- This family are a scattered group of languages in Asia. They are found from eastern India to Vietnam. Languages include Vietnamese and Khmer.
- Niger-Congo Family- This family features the many languages of Africa south of the Sahara. The large number of languages include Swahili, Shona, Xhosa and Zulu.
- Other Families- There are over 100 language families in the world. This section looks at some of them including Nilo-Saharan, Koisan, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, and Independent languages which are unrelated to others.

- Celtic Branch- Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Breton
- Germanic Branch- English, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, Afrikaans German, Yiddish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroes, Icelandic
- Romance (Latin) Branch- Italian, Sardinian French, Provencial, Catalonian, Spanish, Ladino, Galician, Portuguese, Romansh, Romanian, Moldavian
- Slavic Branch- Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Kashubian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian
- Baltic Branch- Lithuanian, Latvian
- Hellenic Branch- Modern Greek
- Illyric Branch- Albanian
- Thracian Branch- Armenian
- Iranian Branch- Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto, Baluchi, Ossetian, Tadzhik
- Indic Branch- Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi, Marathi, Gujerati, Konkani, Sinhalese, Maldivian, Romany