ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the range of languages spoken in the world today, with occasional glimpses at major historical changes in this distribution. The chapter is divided into sections dealing with particular geographical areas. In addition, a major organisational principle of the chapter is the classification of languages into genetic language families, i.e. groups of languages that descend from a single common ancestor (see Chapter 24 above). Mention is made of all the major language families of the world and of individual languages that either have more than about one million speakers or are the official or national language of an independent country.
