General Sites on Language Families

• Language Families
  We believe this is a "must" site for information on the more important language families of the world, including Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Malayo-Polynesian and others. Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi explain what language families are, provide detailed pages on ten major language families, and devote a section of these pages on their KryssTal Web site to other language families, such as the Athapascan Family, the Eskimo-Aleut Family, the Nilo-Saharan Family, and the Khoisan Family. Be sure to check out their Related Pages and External Language Links for The 30 Most Spoken Languages of the World, a most interesting page on Writing, and The Language Museum.

• Ethnologue Language Family Index
  A very complete listing of language family trees that should be of interest to both students and teachers.

• Language Maps
  Superb cartography by Mark Rosenfelder, who created one map showing where Indo-European languages are spoken and another portraying Non-Indo-European Families. Students will also learn geography (a positive feature of this page) because the names of the languages are listed but not the names of the countries.

• Language Families of the World Chart
  Teachers will find this chart with a 12-page teacher's supplement sold by the Exploratorium store useful. "Two years of research, design, and consultation with Stanford University linguists went into the production of this beautiful chart. With it you can trace the history of the English language, find out how Tiwi relates to Pitjantjatjara, or discover the current top 12 languages of the world."

• Ancient Scripts
  Although this site is under major costruction, it still provides a great deal of very useful information on the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, and Sino-Tibetan language families. Lists of common nouns (including numbers) are provided in various languages in each of these families. A useful resource. We look forward to seeing more.

• A Linkage of Languages
  This page is part of the valuable site "African Science" that calls attention to the work of Joseph Greenberg, a famous linguist from UCLA who recently passed away.