Language families and languages
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Language families are groups of languages that are related to each other because they come from a common older language. The languages in such a family are similar in their vocabulary or structure.
For example, French and Spanish both come from Latin. Latin was spoken a long time ago, and some of the people who spoke it started to speak one way, saying, for example, for good: "bueno" while another group started saying "bon." Most words are said a little differently in Spanish and French, so the two are called different languages.
Most languages belong to a language family, but some languages do not. These languages are called Language isolates.
There also are Constructed languages, like for example Esperanto. Constructed languages are made for different reasons: making a 'world language', for fun, for use in fiction, etc.
[edit] Language families
Some language families with sub-families and language examples:
[edit] Indo-European languages
- Celtic languages
- Goidelic languages
- Brythonic languages
- Italic languages
[edit] Other
- Niger-Congo languages
- Sino-Tibetan languages
- Austro-Asiatic languages
- Vietnamese
- Khmer
- Mon
- Tai-Kadai languages
- Na-Dené languages
- Eskimo-Aleut languages
