ABSTRACT
Language is a human activity and, like all human activities, it seems to have infinite variability. Nevertheless, within that variability, patterns and relationships can be discovered. The languages of the world (and the experts estimate that the number of languages ranges from 2,900 to nearly 10,000) are divided into various families, the members of which are considered by linguists to be related because of similarities in structure, grammar, and vocabulary. The major families, or trees, of human languages are the following:
Indo-European
Afro-Asiatic (formerly known as Semitic-Hamitic: Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Coptic)
Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Thai, Burmese)
Japanese and Korean
Uralic-Altaic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, Mongol)
Caucasian (spoken in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan)
Dravidian (spoken in Southern India)
Malayo-Polynesian (the languages of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean)
Austroasiatic (Cambodian, Vietnamese)
African 1
North and South American Indian 1
The orphans: single languages that seem to bear no connection with any other: e.g., Ainu, which is spoken by the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan, or Basque, the language of the inhabitants of the Pyrenees region of Spain and France.
