List of Languages

There are different languages of the world. All languages have their specific features in terms of script, in terms of diction, vocabulary, origin etc.


Language Family
Languages are also grouped together into families. It is said that languages belonging to the same family have common ancestors. Each language family is a group of related languages with a common ancestor. Some of the popular language families are:

The Indo-European Family
The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages spoken in Europe, South Asia (the northern Indian subcontinent ), Southwest Asia (the Iranian plateau), and most of Central Asia. This family has the largest numbers of speakers of the recognized families of languages in the world today. It is also the most widely studied language family in the world because of the following reasons:

• Many of the most important languages of the world, which are also used officially in academic, technical and world organizations and spoken in many countries by more than half the world's population speak one or more of these languages as a business language or as native language are Indo-European. For example: Spanish, French, English, German, Russian.
• Some Indo European languages are essential in multinational contexts or with large numbers of speakers. For example: Hindi, German, Portuguese, Bengali
• Some of the great classical languages of culture, religion and philosophy were Indo-European. For example: Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, Pali
• Languages that are spread around the world as their speakers are part of diasporas (The term diaspora refers to any ethnic population who are forced to leave their traditional home, the dispersal of such people, and the ensuing developments in their culture). For example: Yiddish, Polish, Greek, Romany, Armenian, Italian, Kurdish, Gujarati, Punjabi

The Uralic Family
Not all languages of Europe are Indo-European. The Uralic Family has three European languages as its member- Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian . The family originated form the Ural mountains. Countries that are home to a large number of speakers of Uralic languages include Estonia, Norway, Romania, Finland, Russia, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Sweden.

The Altaic Family
Named after the Alti Mountains, in Central Asia, the Altaic family is spread from Europe (Turkish) through Central Asia (Uzbek), Mongolia (Mongolian), to the Far East (Korean, Japanese). The basic feature of these languages is the vowel harmony. Turkish is the most widely spoken member of this family. Today, altaic is a proposed language family that includes 66 languages mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia.

The Sino-Tibetan Family
The Sino-Tibetan languages include some 250 languages of East Asia, composed of the Chinese (Sinitic) and the Tibeto-Burman languages. In terms of their number of speakers, they are second only to the Indo-European languages. An important language belonging to this family is Mandarin, the language spoken by Chinese.

The Malayo-Polynesian Family
The Malayo-Polynesian Family consists of over 1000 languages belonging to Indian and Pacific Oceans as well South East Asia. The most common languages of this family are Malay, Indonesian, Maori and Hawaiian.

The Afro-Asiatic Family
This family is composed of languages of the Middle East and northern Africa. The dominant languages are Hebrew and Arabic. Arabic is a very important modern and classical language spoken in many Middle East and North African countries and language of the Quran and of Islam.

The Caucasian Family
Named after the Caucas Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the Caucasian family includes Georgian (Georgia), Chechen and Ingush (found in Chechnya in southern Russia), Avar (9 dialects from a region called Dagetsan) and Urartian (language of the Urartu Empire of Eastern Turkey, ehich is extinct), Georgian and Chechen being the main languages.

The Dravidian Family
The family is composed of languages of southern India. Tamil (spoken in Tamil Nadu, northern Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia) is the most popular language of this family. Other languages belonging to this family are Malayalam (Kerala state), Kannada (from Karnataka) and Telugu (Andhra Pradesh).

Austro-Asiatic Family
Ranging from eastern India to Vietnam, the Austro-Asiatic Family represents a scattered group of languages in Asia. Major languages include Vietnamese and Muong.

Niger-Congo Family
Originated in West Africa, the Niger-Congo family is composed of many languages of Africa, south of the Sahara. The large number of languages include Shona, Swahili, Zulu and Xhosa.

Classification of languages
The popular languages which are translated by many translation companies in terms of localizations, interpretation, desktop publishing, documents translations can be classified region wise as shown below:

Indian Languages

Hindi	Gujarati	Assamese
Sanskrit	Bengali	Malayalam
Kannada	Nepalese	Marathi
Oriya	Punjabi	Tamil
Urdu	Telugu

Asian Languages

Burmese	Indonesian	Japanese
Malay	Korean	Dari
Chinese (Mandarin/ Cantonese)	Farsi (Persian)	Pushto
Thai	Vietnamese	Singhalese

Middle East & Eastern European Languages

Arabic	Croatian	Bulgarian
Hebrew	Hungarian	Czech
Ukrainian	Romanian	Serbian
Polish	Russian	Turkish

European Languages

Catalan	Flemish	Dutch
Danish	Finnish	German
French	Greek	Italian
Spanish	Portuguese	Swedish
Norwegian

African & Other Languages

Afrikaans	Armenian	Ndebele
Amharic	Hausa	Igbo