The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family.They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia.The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen …

The Uralic languages (/ j ʊəˈr æ l ɪ k /; sometimes called Uralian languages / j ʊəˈr eɪ l i ə n /) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia.The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for more than half of the family's speakers), Finnish, and Estonian.

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent.Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents.

The Austronesian languages (/ ˌ ɔː s t r ə ˈ n iː ʒ ən /) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples).There are also a number of speakers in continental Asia. They are spoken by about 386 million people (4.9% of the world population).This makes it the fifth …

Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages.Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (six million).