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There are two broad language families: Indo-European and Uralic.
The Indo-European languages are native mainly to Europe. Some languages (English, Spanish, Portugees) spread throughout the world in the colonial era.
It includes most of Europe’s languages and the languages of the Indian peninsula and the Iranian plateau.
There are roughly 450 active Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European family is separated into different sub-families, the biggest of which are the Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Romance, and Balto-Slavic groups.
Forty-six percent of the global population uses an Indo-European language as a native language.
The most spoken languages inside them are English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100,000,000 native speakers.
French, German, Italian, Persian, and Marathi have more than 50,000,000 each.
The Uralic languages are spoken by about 25,000 people, mainly in Northern Eurasia.
The Uralic languages with the largest native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.
Below is a map poster with a complete overlook of the different languages in their old-world language families.
Sizes of the branches represent the recorded native speakers before year 0.
Almost no one hears my accent when speaking English. Occasionally someone does, usually a person with some linguistic training and especially after I have recently spoken my native language. They question: “Where are you from?” Some have come close. One even pegged the district. There is curiosity about the origin of the language. A high school teacher explained it this way: it’s as if you went to sleep in your bed and woke up in a jungle village on the other side of the world and no one else spoke your language, nor knew where you had come from.
[Your research did not include an article in a Finnish magazine some years ago – 1973ish? – which claimed there are about 200 Finnish words which are identical (or nearly so) in sound and meaning to Japanese.]
Nevertheless this map shows why it appears that the origin of the Finnish language has no rational explanation.
Almost no one hears my accent when speaking English. Occasionally someone does, usually a person with some linguistic training and especially after I have recently spoken my native language. They question: “Where are you from?” Some have come close. One even pegged the district. There is curiosity about the origin of the language. A high school teacher explained it this way: it’s as if you went to sleep in your bed and woke up in a jungle village on the other side of the world and no one else spoke your language, nor knew where you had come from.
[Your research did not include an article in a Finnish magazine some years ago – 1973ish? – which claimed there are about 200 Finnish words which are identical (or nearly so) in sound and meaning to Japanese.]
Nevertheless this map shows why it appears that the origin of the Finnish language has no rational explanation.
Thank youl