Language families

About 7 billion people live on Earth. And they speak about 7,000 different languages! Like people, languages can also be related. That is, they originate from a common root. There are also languages that are completely isolated. They are not genetically related to any other language. In Europe, for example, Basque is considered an isolated language. But most languages have "parents", "children" or "siblings". They belong to a particular language family. You can recognize how similar languages are through comparisons. Linguists today count around 300 genetic entities. Among those, there are 180 families that consist of more than one language. The rest make up 120 isolated languages. The largest language family is the Indo-European. It is comprised of around 280 languages. This includes Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. There are more than 3 billion speakers on all continents! The Sino-Tibetan language family is dominant in Asia. It has more than 1.3 billion speakers. The main Sino-Tibetan language is Chinese. The third largest language family is in Africa. It is named after its area of circulation: Niger-Congo. "Only" 350 million speakers belong to it. Swahili is the main language in this family. In most cases: the closer the relationship, the better the understanding. People who speak related languages understand each other well. They can learn the other language relatively quickly. So, learn languages – family reunions are always nice!

Guess the language!

______ is the native language of more than 90 million people. These people live primarily in ______y, Austria and Switzerland. ______ is also spoken in Belgium, Liechtenstein, northern Italy, and Luxembourg. In addition to the native speakers, there are 80 million people who understand ______. ______ is one of the most-learned foreign languages. It is counted among the West ______ic languages, like English and Dutch. It was also influenced by other languages over many centuries. This is due to the fact that the language region is located in the middle of Europe.

Nowadays, English terms above all are integrated into the ______ vocabulary. Another hallmark of the ______ language is the many different dialects. These are increasingly losing importance, however. The standard language is becoming more and more widespread, especially through the media. Because of this, many schools want to teach dialects again. ______ grammar is not especially easy, but it is worth the trouble! ______ is among the ten most important languages of the world.