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Language Families
   Good morning everyone. Today I’m going to talk about some large language families. I’ll start my talk with two questions. Do you know how many languages are used throughout the world today? How many major language families are there? [PAUSE]
   OK, there are more than 3,000 languages used throughout the world today. Almost all of these languages belong to a much smaller number of language families.  All of the languages within a language family are related and all of them have a similar history. Therefore the grammar, vocabulary, and sounds of related languages are similar.  In addition, the way of thinking and the style of talking among related languages is similar.
   Even though there are over 3,000 languages that are used today, there are only about 20 to 30 major language families.
   Let’s take a brief look at some of the largest language families. Each of these large families includes many individual languages.
   The language that we are using now is English. As everybody knows, English has become a world language because of its establishment as a mother tongue outside England. It’s spoken by 320 million people. English is a member of the Indo-European Language Family. This large language family includes most of the languages that are spoken throughout Europe, languages such as English, French, and Greek. Of course, nowadays many Indo-European languages are spoken in other parts of the world.  For instance, Spanish, which is an Indo-European language, is spoken throughout South and Central America, but originally it was spoken only in Europe.
   Another large language family is the Afro-Asiatic Family. I’ll spell it, A-F-R-O, A-S- I-A-T-I-C. The Afro-Asiatic family includes most languages in the area of North Africa. Languages such as Arabic, which is spoken throughout the Middle East, and many of the local languages of the Sahara Desert region such as Hausa are members of the same family.
   Another large family is Bantu, B-A-N-T-U. Bantu includes most of the languages spoken in central and southern Africa. Languages such as Swahili, which has millions of speakers, and smaller languages, such as Zulu, which has close to a hundred thousand speakers, belong to the Bantu family. There are over 250 members of this family.
   In the past few hundred years, there has been a great change in Africa, and outside languages, such as French, are now spoken in some areas of central Africa and southern Africa.
   A fourth large group of language is the Sino-Tibetan Family. Sino-Tibetan includes all dialects of Chinese, which is perhaps the most widely used language in the world. There are nearly 800 million speakers of Chinese dialects.  Sino-Tibetan also includes the languages of Southeast Asia, languages such as Vietnamese and Thai. Of course, not all the languages of East Asia belong to this family. Some languages such as Japanese seem to be completely unrelated to the Sino-Tibetan family.
   Still another major language family is Polynesian. I’ll spell it, P-O-L-Y-N-E-S-I-A- N. The Polynesian languages are island languages. They are spoken on the islands around Indonesia, and on the many islands eastward all the way to Hawaii, and on the islands west all the way to Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa.  Hawaiian and Indonesian are examples of Polynesian languages. Apparently, these languages were spread by travelers from island to island, and then each group of islands developed its own individual language.
   These five language groups, or language families, that we have mentioned here are only a few of the major language families from around the world. There are many more. You should also note that each major language family has several smaller families within it.