World language families

Language statistics & facts | Top 30 languages | 20 countries with the most languages
Language families: By speakers - By languages | Languages in the United States

Language families by speakers

There are over 6900 languages currently spoken in the world. These languages belong to 94 different language families, that is, groups of languages whose share their origins.

Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages: 44% of the world population, or 2.5 billion people, speak a language in the Indo-European family.

Indo-European Languages by Country

Data source: Wikipedia article on "Indo-European Languages."

Over 96% of the earth's inhabitants or 5.5 billion people speak a language in the top 10 language families, meaning that the languages in the remaining 84 groups are spoken by only 4% of the world population!

Top 10 Languages Families by Number of Speakers

Data source: Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th ed. (2005).

Language family	Approx. # of speakers	% of world population
1. Indo-European	2.562 billion	44.78%
2. Sino-Tibetan	1.276 billion	22.28%
3. Niger-Congo	358 million	6.26%
4. Afro-Asiatic	340 million	5.93%
5. Austronesian	312 million	5.45%
6. Dravidian	222 million	3.87%
7. Altaic	145 million	2.53%
8. Japanese	123 million	2.16%
9. Austro-Asiatic	101 million	1.77%
10. Tai-Kadai	78 million	1.37%
		-------------------
Total percentage of world's population:		96.4%

Language statistics & facts | Top 30 languages | 20 countries with the most languages
Language families: By speakers - By languages | Languages in the United States

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World language families

Language families by speakers