From "Taal, het grote avontuur", H. J. Störig, Aula
Although with difficulties, linguists have divided languages into different groups. The different groups are made up of languages that exhibit similar features, whether through the grammatical organization, the morphology, or the etymology of words.
The groups are :
- The Indo-European group, divided into subgroups :
* the Romance languages : French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Franco-Provençal, Romansch, Sardian, Galician, Corsican...
* the Germanic languages : English, German, Dutch, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Afrikaans, Alsatian, Icelandic, Faeroe...
* the Celtic languages : Breton, Welsh, Gaelic, Scottish...
* the Slavic languages : Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croat, Bulgarian, Bielorussian, Ukrainian, Slovene....
* the Iranian languages : Persian, Kurdish, Baluchi, Pashto, Tadjik...
* the Indic languages : Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Urdu, Nepali, Sinhala, Konkan, Oriya...
* the Baltic languages : Latvian, Lithuanian...
* the isolated languages : Modern Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Romany ...
--> This group makes up 200 languages and embraces about 2,5 billion humans, roughly 50% of the world population.
- The group of Agglutinative languages, with the subgroups :
* the Finno-Ugric languages : Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Same (Lappish)...
* the Turkish languages : Tatar, Kazakh, Uïghur, Kirghiz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Azerbaijani...
* the isolated languages : Basque, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian...
* the Amerindian languages : Cree, Cherokee, Sioux, Dakota, Quechua, Guarani, Maya, Nahuatl, Eskimo ...
--> This group is spoken by about 300 million people.
- The Malayo-Polynesian group : Hawaiian, Tahitian, Madagascan, Indonesian, Fijian, Samoan, Filipino/Tagalog...
- The Semite-Cushitic group, with the subgroups :
* the Semitic languages : Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, Maltese...
* the Berber languages : Kabyle, Chaouia, Riff, Tamazight, Tamazret...
* the Cushitic languages : Somali...
- The Dravidian group : Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada ...
- The languages of Africa :
* the Bantu languages : Swahili, Rundi, Zulu, Xhosa, Chiluba, Chishewa, Lingala, Kikongo ...
* the languages of the West Atlantic : Puulaar, Wolof...
* the Mande languages : Bambara, Mandingo, Malinke, Sussu, Soninke ...
* the Voltaic languages : Mora, Senufo, ...
* the languages from the Gulf of Guinea : Ewe, Fon, Yoruba, Ibo...
* the languages between Nigeria and Kenya Haussa, unclassifiable but very similar to other African languages
- The Pidgins and Creoles spoken in Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique...
- The tonal languages from Asia : Chinese, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai...
--> There are more than 1.3 billion people in this last group !
- The languages of Oceania, with the subdivisions :
* the Melanesian languages
* the Papuan languages
* the languages of the Australian natives
--> In this last group, you can find many languages that are spoken by less than 50.000 people.
Scripts
From "the Concise Compendium of the World's Languages", G. L. Campbell, Routledge, 1995.
There are three systems of script around the world.
1. Alphabet : a system of signs or signals which serve as equivalents for letters and sounds
Ex : Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Devanagari, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Modern Greek, Thai
2. Syllabary : a system where signs are associated to a syllable and where a syllable is made up of at least one consonant and one vowel.
Ex : Japanese with the syllabaries Hiragana and Katakana
3. Ideograms : the association of drawings (sometimes very far from the original image) with sounds or ideas.
Ex : Chinese
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