Language families is a term used to classify peoples according to language. The language family includes languages that have kinship among themselves.
A kinship is manifested in the similarity in the sound of words denoting the same subject, as well as in the similarity of elements such as morphemes, grammatical forms.
According to the theory of monogenesis, the language families of the world were formed from the parent language spoken by the ancient peoples. The separation was due to the predominance of the nomadic lifestyle of the tribes and their remoteness from each other.
Language families are divided as follows.
Name of the language family | Languages in the family | Regions of distribution |
Indo-European | Hindi | India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Fiji |
Urdu | India, Pakistan |
Russian | Countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe |
English | USA, UK, Europe, Canada, South America, Africa, Australia |
Deutsch | Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy |
French | France, Tunisia, Monaco, Canada, Algeria, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg |
Portuguese | Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, Macau |
Bengal | Bengal, India, Bangladesh |
Altai | Tatar | Tatarstan, Russia, Ukraine |
Mongolian | Mongolia, PRC |
Azerbaijani | Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Central Asia |
Turkish | Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Romania, USA, France, Sweden |
Bashkir | Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Urdmutiya, Russia. |
Kyrgyz | Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, China |
Ural | Hungarian | Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia |
Mordovian | Mordovia, Russia, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan |
Evenk | Russia, China, Mongolia |
Finnish | Finland, Sweden, Norway, Karelia |
Karelian | Karelia, Finland |
Caucasian | Georgian | Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran |
Abkhazian | Abkhazia, Turkey, Russia, Syria, Iraq |
Chechen | Chechnya, Ingushetia, Georgia, Dagestan |
Sino-Tibetan | Chinese | China, Taiwan, Singapore |
Thai | Thailand |
Laotian | Laos, Thailand, |
Siamese | Thailand |
Tibetan | Tibet, China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan |
Burmese | Myanmar (Burma) |
African asian | Arab | Arab countries, Iraq, Israel, Chad, Somalia, |
Hebrew | |
Barbary | Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Egypt, Mauritania |
From this table it can be seen that the languages of one family can be distributed in various countries and parts of the world. And the very concept of “language families” was introduced to facilitate the classification of languages and the compilation of their family tree. The most common and numerous is the Indo-European family of languages. Nations that speak the languages of the Indo-European family can be found in any hemisphere of the Earth, in any part of the world, on any continent and in any country. There are also languages that are not included in any language family. These are dead languages and artificial.
If we talk about the territory of Russia, then there are a variety of language families. The country is inhabited by people of more than 150 different nationalities who can consider their mother tongue from almost every language family. The territorially linguistic families of Russia are distributed depending on which country a region borders with, which language is most common in a country bordering the region.
From ancient times, some nationalities occupied a certain territory. And at first glance it may seem strange why it is precisely these linguistic families and languages that prevail in this region. But there is nothing strange about this. In ancient times, migrations of people were determined by the search for new hunting grounds, new lands for agriculture, and some tribes simply led a nomadic lifestyle.
A significant role is also played by forced relocations of entire peoples during the Soviet era. Most fully represented in Russia are languages from the Indo-European, Uralic, Caucasian and Altai families. Indo-European family occupies Western and Central Russia. Representatives of the
Uralic language family live mainly in the north-west of the country. The northeast and southern regions are predominantly occupied by Altai language groups. Caucasian languages are represented mainly in the territory lying between the Black and Caspian seas.