Language Families
Major language families of the world.
Major language families with their principal languages and regions: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Dravidian and Uralic, plus Turkic, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Japonic, Koreanic, Nilo-Saharan, Mongolic, Quechuan, Algonquian and Eskimo-Aleut.
Use it when
- You need to place a language in its family and region.
- You are comparing language groups for typology or history.
Watch out for
- Some groupings are debated: Japonic and Koreanic are often treated as separate families, and the Altaic hypothesis that would link Turkic and Mongolic is not accepted by most linguists.
- Many languages are isolates or unclassified, such as Basque; the table lists only larger families.
The data
17 rows
| Family | Major languages | Region |
|---|---|---|
| Indo-European | English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian | Europe, South Asia, Americas |
| Sino-Tibetan | Mandarin, Cantonese, Burmese | East Asia, Southeast Asia |
| Afro-Asiatic | Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic | Middle East, North Africa |
| Niger-Congo | Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu | Sub-Saharan Africa |
| Austronesian | Indonesian, Tagalog, Malagasy | Southeast Asia, Oceania, Madagascar |
| Dravidian | Tamil, Telugu, Kannada | South India, Sri Lanka |
| Uralic | Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian | Northern Eurasia |
| Turkic | Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur | Anatolia, Central Asia, Siberia |
| Austroasiatic | Vietnamese, Khmer, Santali | Southeast Asia, eastern India |
| Tai-Kadai | Thai, Lao, Zhuang | Southeast Asia, southern China |
| Japonic | Japanese, Ryukyuan languages | Japan |
| Koreanic | Korean, Jeju | Korean Peninsula |
| Nilo-Saharan | Luo, Kanuri, Nubian languages | Sahel and East Africa |
| Mongolic | Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk | Mongolia, northern China, southern Russia |
| Quechuan | Quechua varieties | Andes of South America |
| Algonquian | Cree, Ojibwe, Blackfoot | North America |
| Eskimo-Aleut | Inuktitut, Greenlandic, Yupik, Aleut | Arctic North America, Greenland, Siberia |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | family | string | Indo-European |
| data | major_languages | string | English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian |
| data | region | string | Europe, South Asia, Americas |
Fetch the same bytes
The static files contain the same reference rows as the API, with no API rate limit. Live metadata, such as view counts, may differ. Use the API for content negotiation; use the static files for a cacheable snapshot.
curl "https://yjtoon.yunusemrevurgun.com/api/dataset/language-families?format=toon"
const res = await fetch( "https://yjtoon.yunusemrevurgun.com/static-data/dataset/language-families.toon" ); const toon = await res.text();
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