As a kid I went through quite a few drawing pads. One of them had a wonderful cover image that I meticulously cut out and kept for years. It was a drawing of a tree, with each leaf representing a language in the Indo-European language family. I studied this drawing so often, after a while it was just natural for me to recount where any language sat in relation to others. I still remember quite a lot of it, and am able to stand my ground when people at dinner parties ask whether my native language, Latvian, is similar to Russian.¹

The language tree is, of course, a scientific metaphor, and I find it so elegant I’ve never been able to think about the historical relation of languages in any other way. Akin to a family tree, the language tree branches from a common, ancient proto-language to groups of descendant languages, both dead and still in use.

Even though the Indo-European family contains the languages spoken by 45% of the world’s population today, it is not the largest in terms of languages it contains. That honour goes to the Niger-Congo family, which contains a whopping 1,532 languages. Indo-European can boast only 439.

Overall, it is estimated there are 147 language families in the world, and around 6,900 languages. And not all of these languages even belong to a family. These ‘unrelated’ languages are known as isolates, in effect a family all by themselves. Basque and Korean are examples of being isolates, while Greek is known as an isolate within its own family (Indo-European), because it occupies a whole branch by itself.

For a beautiful representation of all modern Indo-European languages, check out this gorgeous comic-infographic tree (with cats!) over at the Stand Still. Stay Silent webcomic by Minna Sundberg. I’ve included a small fragment in the feature image of this article, but you really must see the full thing.