List of language families

This set of lists of language families also includes language isolates, unclassified languages and other types of languages.

Ethnologue 18 lists the following language families as containing at least 1% of the 7,472 known languages in the world:

Glottolog 2.4 lists the following as the largest families:

Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect. For example, Lyle Campbell counts 27 Otomanguean languages, though he, Ethnologue, and Glottolog disagree as to which languages belong in the family.

In the following, each bullet item is a known or suspected language family. Phyla with historically wide geographical distributions but comparatively few current-day speakers include Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dené, Algic, Quechuan and Nilo-Saharan. The geographic headings over them are meant solely as a tool for grouping families into collections more comprehensible than an unstructured list of a few hundred independent families. Geographic relationship is convenient for that purpose, but these headings are not a suggestion of any "super-families" phylogenetically relating the families named. The number of individual languages in a family and number of speakers are only rough estimates. See dialect or language and linguistic demography for further explanation.

Language isolates are languages which are not part of any known language family. They can be alternatively described as the sole representants of a family.

Languages are considered unclassified either because, for one reason or another, little effort has been made to compare them with other languages, or, more commonly, because they are too poorly documented to permit reliable classification. Most such languages are extinct and most likely will never be known well enough to classify.

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