Which is the world's second largest language family by number of speakers?

Language families are groups of languages that share a common ancestor. Ranked by the number of native speakers, the largest language families of the world are:

Indo-European: the largest, with about 3 billion or more speakers (about 45% of the world's population). It includes English, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, German, French, Persian and Punjabi.

Sino-Tibetan: the second largest, with about 1.4 billion speakers. It includes Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese and other varieties), Tibetan, Burmese and the Tibeto-Burman languages of North-East India such as Manipuri (Meitei), Bodo, Mizo and the Naga languages. Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers of any single language in the world.

Niger-Congo: the largest family by number of languages (over 1,500), spoken across sub-Saharan Africa. It includes Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Zulu.

Afro-Asiatic: includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Somali and Hausa.

Austronesian: spread over a vast area from Madagascar to Hawaii, including Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog (Filipino), Javanese, Maori and Hawaiian.

Other important families include Dravidian (South India), Austroasiatic (including Vietnamese, Khmer, Khasi and Santhali), Turkic, Japonic and Koreanic.

In India, the four main language families are Indo-Aryan (part of Indo-European), Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman (part of Sino-Tibetan).

UNESCO and the "Ethnologue" database estimate that there are about 7,000 languages in the world today, and that a large number of them are endangered.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Afro-Asiatic includes Arabic and Hebrew, but it has fewer speakers than Sino-Tibetan.
• ✗Niger-Congo has the most languages, but fewer speakers than Sino-Tibetan.
• ✗Austronesian covers the largest area of ocean, but has fewer speakers.