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Sino-Tibetan languages

(Encyclopedia)Sino-Tibetan languages, family of languages spoken by over a billion people in central and SE Asia. This linguistic family is second only to the Indo-European stock in the number of its speakers. It i...

Central Asian Republics

(Encyclopedia)Central Asian Republics, the countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Constituent republics of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they all achieved i...

Afro-Asian Bloc

(Encyclopedia)Afro-Asian Bloc: see Third World. ...

Dravidian languages

(Encyclopedia)Dravidian languages drəvĭdˈēən [key], family of about 23 languages that appears to be unrelated to any other known language family. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million peo...

Dardic languages

(Encyclopedia)Dardic languages därˈdĭk [key], group of languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian. ...

Click languages

(Encyclopedia)Click languages: see African languages. ...

Italic languages

(Encyclopedia)Italic languages, subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages that may be divided into two groups. The first group consists of the ancient Italic languages and dialects that were once spoken in...

Iranian languages

(Encyclopedia)Iranian languages, group of languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian family of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages. ...

Indic languages

(Encyclopedia)Indic languages, group of languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian. ...

Hamitic languages

(Encyclopedia)Hamitic languages, subfamily of the Hamito-Semitic family of languages, a now-abandoned system of classification for languages of N Africa and SW Asia. The Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and (sometimes) ...