Language family
Major language families

Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates.

Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists the following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world:

Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages, pidgins, and unclassifiable languages):

Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in the family.
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