The major language families of the world include:
- Indo-European: The largest and most widely spoken family, including languages like English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Russian, and many others across Europe, South Asia, and parts of the Middle East.
- Sino-Tibetan: Primarily spoken in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of South Asia. It includes languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Tibetan, and Burmese.
- Niger-Congo: The largest language family in Africa, which includes languages like Swahili, Zulu, Yoruba, Igbo, and Shona, among others.
- Afro-Asiatic: Spoken mainly in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. It includes languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Somali.
- Austronesian: A family spoken across the Pacific Ocean, Southeast Asia, and parts of Madagascar. Languages in this family include Tagalog (Filipino), Hawaiian, Maori, and Malagasy.
- Dravidian: Primarily spoken in southern India and parts of Sri Lanka, with languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
- Turkic: Spoken across Central Asia, Siberia, and parts of Eastern Europe, with languages like Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Turkmen.
- Uralic: Includes languages like Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian, spoken in parts of Northern Europe and Siberia.
- Altaic (sometimes considered a hypothetical family): Includes languages like Turkish, Mongolian, and some other Central Asian languages, though its status as a language family is debated.
- Khoisan: A smaller family of languages, mainly spoken in Southern Africa, known for their use of click sounds.
These families represent a broad range of linguistic diversity and geographical distribution.