A language family tree

Linguists have often used trees and branches as metaphors to explain and map the connections between language groups.

The European arm of the tree splits off into Slavic, Romance and Germanic branches.

The size of the leaves on the trees is intended to indicate – roughly – how many people speak each language. It shows the relative size of English as well as its Germanic roots.

The left side of the tree maps out the Indo-Iranian languages. It shows the connections between Hindi and Urdu as well as some regional Indian languages such as Rajasthani and Gujarati. It also shows how Bangla, Assamese, Oriya, Sinhala share the same roots.

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree.

Language families can be divided into smaller units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. In a family, all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family.

A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language, being the root which all languages in the family stem from. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly. However, it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method.

Endangered languages

There are more than 7,000 living languages in the world, but UNESCO predicts more than half will be extinct by the end of the century. Will these be among the first to go?

There are a little over 7,000 languages in the world. 400 languages account for the 95% of the world's population. Remaining languages are spoken only by 5% of the population.

UNESCO is predicting that half of all languages will be gone by the end of this century.

A language dies every 2 weeks. Over 2,000 of the world's 7,000 languages have fewer than 1,000 native speakers. Around 18 languages have only 1 remaining speaker.

Vitality of languages worldwide:

Extinct from 1950: 3.8%

Vulnerable: 9.9%

Severely endangered: 8.9%

Definitely endangered: 10.7%

Critically endangered: 9.6%

Safe (and data-deficient): 57.1%

Vulnerable - most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)

Definitely endangered - children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home

Severely endangered - language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves

Critically endangered - the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently

Extinct - there are no speakers left

The Most-Used Languages On The Internet

There are two measures of language use on the internet, and they tell two different stories.

If you are looking at how many people use the internet, the top 10 languages online reflect the population of the world at least somewhat accurately.

Most- Used Languages Online By User – Percentage Of World

1. English 25.4%

2. Chinese     19.3%

3. Spanish     8.1%

4. Arabic     5.3%

5. Portuguese     4.1%

6. Indonesian/Malaysian     4.1%

7. French    3.2%

8. Japanese     2.9%

9. Russian     2.6%

10. German     2.2%

*Population estimates vary widely by source. World population totals were retrieved from Ethnologue and internet population totals from Internet World Stats.

If you look at W3Techs' statistics for how much content in each language is online, however, there's a different trend.

Most-Used Language Online By Content – Percentage Of World

1. English     54.0%

2. Russian     6.0%

3. German     6.0%

4. Spanish     4.9%

5. French     4.0%

6. Japanese     3.4%

7. Portuguese     2.9%

8. Italian     2.3%

9. Persian     2.0%

10. Polish     1.7%

Source: 

What Are The Most-Used Languages On The Internet?

Visualizing the Most Used Languages on the Internet

Infographic: Languages Most Used On the Web vs. IRL | Statista