How many language families are there?

[babyleans]

Hi guys, i was just wondering how many language families exist and also what they are. How do people know which languages are related and which ones are not?

[Pesto]

Holy moly, you have no clue how tricky it was to find a decent chart regarding language families... I've linked to a large map that shows the distribution of language families across the Earth's continents.  As you can see, the number of families present is vast.  So many other charts I came across were very Euro-centric and ignored families that were based in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa.  I wish I could find a decent flow chart that shows from which origin languages these originated.

As for knowing how languages are related, basically tons of comparison between different lexical features is how it's done.  Really, any description that I state of this process would not be any good considering that I lack the sort terminology that I could use to properly describe the process without too much jargon.

[Trellum]

I'm not 100% sure, but I read somewhere that there are 147 different language families.  I'm not sure if we can be 100% sure of that number, but according to the site I read there are 147 language families.  I guess different experts surely have different numbers.

[tuparientemateo]

I saw this video a week ago and think it might help you out. It's not completely known how many families or origins there are, and there are thousands of languages.

[babyleans]

Wow! I see the language families are numerous. I thought they were five or six!

[Shearah]

Wow that's a really tough question. You would need to do much research and still wouldn't be 100% sure that it's a correct answer. There's many and many language families!