The Geography of Language
Terms
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- Caucasian
- Georgian, about 6 million speakers
- Indo-European
- (English, Russian, Farsi, Hindi) About 3 billion speakers, originally Europe Asia now worldwide
- Language Groups
- a collection of languages within branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display the relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary
- Niger-Congo
- (Yoruba, Swahili) about 200 million speakers, Sub-sharan africa
- Korean
- Korean, about 50 million speakers
- Khoisan
- click language, KhoiKhoi, about 50, 000 speakers
- Tai
- Tai, about 50 million speakers
- Dravidian
- (Tamil, Malayalam) about 1/4 billion speakers, southern india
- Japanese
- (Japanese) about 125 million speakers, Japan
- Sino-Tibetan
- (Chinese, Tibetan) about 1.5 billion speakers, mostly in China and surrounding areas
- Language Branches
- a collection of languages related through a common ancestor several thousand years ago.
- Austro-Asiatic
- Vietnamese, about 60 million speakers
- Language Family
- a group of languages which are descended from a single common earlier language
- Altaic
- (turkish, Mongol) about 200 million speakers, Turkey to Mongolia
- Afro-Asiatic
- (Arabic, Hebrew) almost half a billion speakers; mostly in North Africa & Southwest Asia
- Austronesian
- (Hawaiian, Malageasy) more than a 1/4 billion speakers, pacific ocean to madagascar