"A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The ...
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term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.
According to Ethnologue the 7,111 living human languages are distributed in 141 different language families. A "living language" is simply one that is currently used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also many dead languages, or languages which have no native speakers living, and extinct languages, which have no native speakers and no descendant languages. Finally, there are some languages that are insufficiently studied to be classified, and probably some which are not even known to exist outside their respective speech communities." - (en.wikipedia.org 07.02.2020)
