The languages of the world

1. Generalities

2. Groups of languages

3. Scripts

1. Generalities

We use two criteria to define the word "language" :

1. A structured and written grammar OR

2. A translation of the Gospel according to St John

Today, all around the world, people speak about 3,000 different languages. However, only 100/120 languages are spoken by more than 1 million people and a dozen or so are spoken by more than 100 million people !

From Les langages de l'humanité, Michel Malherbe, collection Bouquins, Robert Laffont.

* Estimate in million speakers

The 3,000 languages are geographically situated :

50 North America

250 Central and South America

1000 à 1200 Africa

600 à 800 South-West Asia and Oceania

700 à 800 Asia

60 Europe

          5 billion humans speak 100 languages : that means the other 2.900 languages are spoken only by 500/700 million people.

2. Groups of languages

From Taal, het grote avontuur, H. J. Störig, Aula

Although with difficulties, linguists have divided languages into different groups. The different groups are made up of languages that exhibit similar features, whether through the grammatical organization, the morphology, or the etymology of words.

The groups are :

The Indo-European group, divided into subgroups :

• the Romance languages : French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Franco-Provençal, Romansch, Sardian, Galician, Corsican...
• the Germanic languages : English, German, Dutch, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Afrikaans, Alsatian, Icelandic, Faeroe...
• the Celtic languages : Breton, Welsh, Gaelic, Scottish...
• the Slavic languages : Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croat, Bulgarian, Bielorussian, Ukrainian, Slovene....
• the Iranian languages : Persian, Kurdish, Baluchi, Pashto, Tadjik...
• the Indic languages : Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Urdu, Nepali, Sinhala, Konkan, Oriya...
• the Baltic languages : Latvian, Lithuanian...
• the Isolated languages : Modern Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Romany ...

    This group makes up 200 languages and embraces about 2,5 billion humans, roughly 50% of the world population.

The group of Agglutinative languages, with the subgroups :

• the Finno-Ugric languages : Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Same (Lappish)...
• the Turkish languages : Tatar, Kazakh, Uïghur, Kirghiz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Azerbaijani...
• the Isolated languages : Basque, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian...
• the Amerindian languages : Cree, Cherokee, Sioux, Dakota, Quechua, Guarani, Maya, Nahuatl, Eskimo ...

    This group is spoken by about 300 million people.

The Malayo-Polynesian group : Hawaiian, Tahitian, Madagascan, Indonesian, Fijian, Samoan, Filipino/Tagalog...

The Semite-Cushitic group, with the subgroups :

• the Semitic languages : Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, Maltese...
• the Berber languages : Kabyle, Chaouia, Riff, Tamazight, Tamazret...
• the Cushitic languages : Somali...

The Dravidian group : Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada ...

The languages of Africa :

• the Bantu languages : Swahili, Rundi, Zulu, Xhosa, Chiluba, Chishewa, Lingala, Kikongo ...
• the languages of the West Atlantic : Puulaar, Wolof... the Mande languages : Bambara, Mandingo, Malinke, Sussu, Soninke ...
• the Voltaic languages : Mora, Senufo, ...
• the languages from the Gulf of Guinea : Ewe, Fon, Yoruba, Ibo...
• the languages between Nigeria and Kenya
• Haussa, unclassifiable but very similar to other African languages

The Pidgins and Creoles spoken in Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique...

The tonal languages from Asia : Chinese, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai...
    There are more than 1.3 billion people in this last group !

The languages of Oceania, with the subdivisions :

• the Melanesian languages
• the Papuan languages
• the languages of the Australian natives

    In this last group, you can find many languages that are spoken by less than 50.000 people.

3. Scripts

From the Concise Compendium of the World's Languages, G. L. Campbell, Routledge, 1995.

There are three systems of script around the world: to see them, click on the hyperlinks!

1. Alphabet : a system of signs or signals which serve as equivalents for letters and sounds

    Ex : Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Devanagari, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Modern Greek, Thai

2. Syllabary : a system where signs are associated to a syllable and where a syllable is made up of at least one consonant and one vowel.

    Ex : Japanese with the syllabaries Hiragana and Katakana

3. Ideograms : the association of drawings (sometimes very far from the original image) with sounds or ideas.

    Ex : Chinese