Rich and Strange Aeons

I knew there were many language families, and many of their names indicate where they are, but I thought it'd be useful to associate them with famous languages (and with a large number of speakers) to stand as representatives, as well as targets for learning if you wanted to go look at exotic languages. So I went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families and clicked a lot.

Takeaway: you can't do this for all language families, because there are dozens of them -- heck, dozens in each of the Americas, New Guinea, and Australia alone. Not counting isolates, of which there are many. But, going by the big groups (at least 1% of world population, which is nearly 70 million people), we have, in order of native speakers:

Family (example languages, and notes) [% of world native speakers]

* Indo-European (duh) [46%]
* Sino-Tibetan (Chinese; Burmese, Tibetan) [21%]
* Niger-Congo (Yoruba, Zulu, Swahili) [6.4%]
* Afro-Asiatic/Hamito-Semitic (Arabic, Berber, Amharic, Hausa, Egyptian, Hebrew, Akkadian)
* Austronesian (Indonesian, Hawaiian; 9 of 10 branches only on homeland of Taiwan/Formosa; very diverse)
* Dravidian (Tamil; south India) [3.7%]
* Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, maybe Korean and Japanese; disputed)
* Austro-Asiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer (Cambodia), Munda (indigenes of India))
* Tai-Kadai/Kradai (Thai, Lao; highly tonal) [1.3%]

some others of note:

Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian, Sami, Estonian)
South Caucasian/Kartvelian (Georgian)
Hmong-Mien (Hmong, which has 12 tones)
Iroquois (Cherokee)
Mayan
Uto-Aztecan (Nahuatl)
Quechua (Andes, Inca)
Eskimo-Aleut (Yupik, Inuit, Aleut)
Algic (Algonquian; Blackfoot, Cree, Massachusett, Mohican; has a couple in California)
Tupian (Brazil; Tupi, Guarani)
Khoisan (click; Khoi, San; no longer accepted as a single family)
Ainu
Sumerian (isolate)

But there are many many others. E.g. at least one non-Eskimo family that's in both Siberia and NW America, not to mention other Siberian and American families separately. Seven families indigenous to Mesoamerica, with Maya and Aztec representing only two of them. New Guinea's many, Australia's many...


There's also a concept of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund
unrelated languages in an area resembling each other through mutual exchange

blend of Romance, Slavic, etc. in Balkans (Albanian, Romanian, south Slavic, Greek, Romani)
Indo-Aryan/Dravidian
tonal and vowel sharing in SE Asia, Sino/Thai/Khmer
possibly the whole Altaic 'family'
clicks from Khoisan into Bantu/Nguni


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family has a map and other discussion

Which languages to learn to maximize the number of speakers is a traditional exercise, going something like English, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, Bengali, Portuguese, Japanese, German... But what if you wanted to learn one language per family, while maximizing speakers?

English, Mandarin, Swahili, Arabic, Indonesian, Tamil, Japanese, maybe Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai; possibly Korean; Hungarian. This can be seen as how to learn up to 12 useful languages while minimizing the possibility of any re-use to make your life easier. :)


Of course both lists can look different if weighted by one's personal probability of running into the language or speakers thereof.