Ethnologue Classification

• This page is a part of series in Classifying Names by Culture

Ethnologue is a print and online publication that provides extremely well researched and detailed information on both contemporary and historic language usages (and development) around the world.

Of particular use to researchers is the summary of language usages by family and country. Other reference information on languages by country is available from wikipedia.

The Ethnologue data was used to determine the dominant contemporary language family for each United Nations recognised country (Ethnologue-CountryDominantLanguage.txt). The language families were then grouped in 'pseudo-families'. The pseudo-families are useful but strictly 'illegimate' unit of aggregation. Ethnologue recognizes six dominant top-level language families and a total of 94 contemporary language families. Of these, we group the 40 most used languages in 8 pseudo-families (Ethnologue-LanguageFamilies.txt) for our classification purposes.

List of 'Useful' Families

The 8 pseudo-families and the 40 families are:

• Afro-Asiatic
  • Berber
  • Chadic
  • Cushitic
  • Semitic
• Altaic
  • Korean
  • Japonic
  • Mongolic
  • Tungusic
  • Turkic
  • Tungestic
  • OtherAltaic
• Indo-European
  • Baltic
  • Celtic
  • Germanic
  • Indo-Aryan
  • Iranian
  • Romance
  • Greek
  • Basque
• Sino-Tibetan
  • Chinese
  • Tibeto-Burman
• Austro*
  • Austro-Asiatic
  • Austronesian
  • Papuan
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Dravidian
• Slavic
  • Albanian
  • Armenian
  • Slavic
  • Caucasus
  • Uralic
• African
  • Niger-Congo
  • Nilo-Saharan
  • Paleosiberian
  • Khoisan
  • OtherAfrican
• Native
  • NativeAmerican
  • AustralianAboriginal
  • Eskimo-Aleut

Map of Language Families

Ethnologue Language Families (C) Wikicommons