Language is a system of sounds, symbols, and gestures that are used to communicate. It is the ability to use these systems to produce and comprehend messages. The study of language is called linguistics.
There are around 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. They can be divided into two main groups: those that are related to each other, and those that are not. The vast majority of languages belong to families—groups of languages that share a common ancestor. For example, English belongs to the Indo-European family, which includes most of the languages spoken in Europe and South Asia.
The largest language families are: Indo-European (including English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Persian, German), Sino-Tibetan (including Mandarin Chinese, Tibetan), Afro-Asiatic ( including Arabic , Hebrew , Berber ), Austronesian ( including Malay , Indonesian , Tagalog ), Niger-Congo ( including Swahili , Zulu ), Turkic ( including Turkish , Uzbek ), Uralic ( including Hungarian , Finnish ), Altaic (including Turkic, Mongolian , Korean ).
Some families include hundreds of languages; others include only a few dozen.
Languages can also be classified according to their geographical distribution . The four main regions where languages are found are Africa , Eurasia , Australasia , and the Americas . Each region has its own characteristic linguistic features .
The concept of language is complex and has been studied by philosophers , linguists , psychologists , anthropologists , and many other scholars for centuries . In recent years there has been much research on how children acquire language skills . This work has led to important insights into how humans process information and how we learn .