World Languages and Families

About how many living languages exist in the world?

• 70,000
• 70
• 700
• 7,000

Which language family has the most speakers?

• Indo-European
• Niger-Congo
• Sino-Tibetan
• Uralic

The ancient parent tongue of Indo-European languages is called ____.

• Old Latin
• Proto-Uralic
• Proto-Sino
• Proto-Indo-European

Which language has the most native speakers?

• Mandarin Chinese
• English
• Hindi
• Spanish

English is the most widely spoken language when second-language speakers are counted.

• True
• False

Which country has the most Spanish speakers?

• Colombia
• Mexico
• Spain
• Argentina

Arabic belongs to the ____ language family.

• Sino-Tibetan
• Dravidian
• Afro-Asiatic
• Indo-European

Which is the largest African language family?

• Dravidian
• Uralic
• Afro-Asiatic
• Niger-Congo

Swahili is used as a shared trade language in East Africa.

• True
• False

Tamil and Telugu belong to which family?

• Indo-European
• Sino-Tibetan
• Dravidian
• Uralic

Hindi and Bengali belong to the Dravidian family.

• True
• False

Which family includes Finnish and Hungarian?

• Afro-Asiatic
• Austronesian
• Uralic
• Indo-European

Basque has no known relatives, so it is called a language ____.

• branch
• isolate
• family
• dialect

The Austronesian family stretches from Madagascar to Hawaii and New Zealand.

• True
• False

Sign languages are just hand versions of spoken languages.

• True
• False