What ARE all these Languages?

November 6, 2025 - Writing
Adapted from a WIP video script! // include language speaking locations?

We've all been there -- opening up a website or video game, only to be greeted by a language selection screen, wondering in the back of our heads: "What ARE all these languages?" 

There are many that you probably recognize (Español, Français, Italiano), but others that may be less likely (Suomi, 日本語, हिन्दी). Obviously, I won't be going over every language that's ever been supported by any website, but we've both seen the usual suspects over and over. Thankfully, linguists have already done the difficult part for us and categorized languages into families, so we can go over these families to brush over each of the languages!

Language Families

Since you're most likely familiar with English, let's talk about it. Despite having over 50% of its vocabulary belonging to the Romance family, English is a Germanic language. Why is it a Germanic language and not a Romance language? That's because language families are based on descent.

To massively simplify things, English came from Old English, which came from West Germanic, which came from Proto-Germanic. All the languages that came from Proto-Germanic have striking similarities in their sounds, vocabulary, grammar, etc., even if they've all evolved in different ways. For example, "milk" in English is "mjölk" in Swedish, "melk" in Dutch, and "Milch" in German. Even if English borrowed a lot of words from Romance languages like French and Latin, their words "lait" and "lact" are noticeably different (even if recognizable from terms like "lactose intolerance"), as are their sound inventories (most noticeable in the vowels!).

If we keep going further back, both the Germanic and Romance languages belong to the Indo-European family, which are languages that came from Proto-Indo-European (a language only known through linguistic reconstruction). You can essentially imagine this as the base of a tree which splits off into multiple branches, and those branches into more branches. We'll be using these "trees" when they're helpful, but you'll understand soon why they won't always be helpful for this particular article. Still, knowing these branches can be helpful because if you run into a language you don't recognize, you can connect them to one of these languages! Though, we should really get started before we get too deep in the weeds.

Indo-European Languages

As the name suggests, these generally include languages that originated in India and Europe, even though it also includes many other languages. We'll start with the European ones since those are the ones that English speakers are most likely familiar with!

Germanic Languages

This is a fun one to start with because we start off with an obvious one -- German! Since language menus will often list languages in their native language, you'll usually see this listed as Deutsch. Wait, Deutsch isn't Dutch? The reason can be summarized as "some confusing history" where Germany is called different things by a ton of European languages. Either way, Dutch (Nederlands, natively) is also a Germanic language. 

English, Dutch, and German all belong to the West Germanic branch, and are the most well-known languages of that branch. The Germanic branch breaks off into the North, West, and East Germanic branches, though the last one exclusively contains extinct languages. Many of the North Germanic languages should be languages you recognize too, most notably: Swedish (Svenska), Danish (Dansk), and Norwegian (Norsk). 

Even though English has a lot of Romance vocabulary, a lot of its basic vocabulary is very similar to the Germanic languages. Compare:

• English: brother

• Dutch: broer

• German: Bruder

• Swedish: bror

• Danish: bror

• Norwegian: bror

In terms of grammar and vocabulary, the West Germanic languages are noticeably different. However, the North Germanic languages are generally considered mutually intelligible (that is, speakers can understand each other solely with the knowledge of their own language) due to their similarities. Other than a few of the Romance languages, these (outside of German, ironically) are generally considered the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, since they're closely related.

If you want to hear each of these languages in action, this is a neat video to compare them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq2_gTETBXM 

Romance Languages

Despite people (understandably) confusing this term with the implication that these languages must be romantic, it actually refers to the Romans! The Romance languages are those descended from Latin, and there's a high chance you know many of these. 

Spanish (Español), French (Français), Portugese (Português), and Italian (Italiano) are some of the most spoken ones, but you may also see other languages like Catalan (Català) on these lists. Due to history, these are generally highly-regarded languages that sound very beautiful, especially by English speakers. 

Since Latin "died" not so long ago, it's not common to hear of any sub-branches of the Romance languages, and speakers of the languages can often put together enough words from written text to understand each other. In some cases, they can even understand the spoken tongue! Compare a word like "cat":

• Spanish: gato / gata

• French: chat / chatte

• Portugese: gato / gata

• Italian: gatto / gatta

• Catalan: gat

 French is noticeably different from the other Romance languages, largely in pronunciation, which is mainly credited to German influence. Still, in writing it can be largely understood through context by other Romance speakers due to its rather archaic spelling.

You'll also often see something like Portugese (Brazil) and Portugese (Portugal) because this is a difference larger than something like British/American English. It's actually ended up in the funny position where despite being the origin of Portugese, Portugal is now outnumbered by Brazilian speakers. 

Since these languages are relatively standardized from their widespread use, and a lot of the vocabulary is familiar to English speakers, these are often considered the other half of the category of easiest languages for English speakers to learn, despite the grammatical and phonological differences. Conjugation is a very common pain point for English speakers learning Romance languages in school, since verbs can have many different forms based on the subject and tense.

Here's another spoken comparison: https://youtu.be/4mvoyxiUfsA 

Slavic Languages

We're beginning to move out of more familiar territory and talking about the Slavic languages. While there's a chance you recognize this term, these languages have a lot less influence on English compared to the last two categories.

The most well-known of these is Russian (Русский), which is an East Slavic language, along with Ukrainian (Українська). The West Slavic languages include Polish (Polski), Czech (Čeština), and Slovak (Slovenčina), while the South Slavic languages include Slovenian (Slovenščina), Serbian (Српски), and Croatian (Hrvatski).

If some of the letters from the native names look unfamiliar to you, that's because they use the Cyrillic alphabet! I haven't studied a large amount of the Slavic languages, so take some of this information with a grain of salt, but despite sometimes looking intimidating, the Cyrillic alphabet is actually pretty straightforward. Words are largely spelled as they sound, but it's the grammar that really makes the Slavic languages difficult to learn, where words can be transformed to an even more complicated degree than the Romance languages. 

Still, you can see a comparison of the word "sister" and note how similar it is to Germanic:

• Russian: сестра (sestra)

• Ukrainian: сестра (sestra)

• Polish: siostra

• Czech: sestra 

• Slovak: sestra

• Slovenian: sestra

• Serbian: сестра (sestra)

• Croatian: sestra

Polish seems to be an odd one out here, and that's most likely because, among other reasons, it was largely influenced by Romance languages. It also seems to have a cute relationship with Czech where Poles find the language to sound similar, diminutive, and just plain funny to them. Another interesting pair is Serbian and Croatian which are incredibly similar, but considering them the same language seems to be very controversial. 

As for why some of the languages use the Latin alphabet and others use the Cyrillic alphabet, it goes back to history, as usual. 

Here's the Slavic comparison video: https://youtu.be/_QkzWshIzFM 

Uralic Languages (Hungarian, Finnish)

Indo-Aryan Languages (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi)

Other Languages (Irish, Greek, Persian)

Austronesian Languages (Malay, Indonesian)

East Asian Languages (JP, Chinese, Korean)

While not actually related linguistically, the East Asian languages have a lot of history that's caused them to have large amounts of influence on each other.

There are many East Asian languages, but the biggest ones you most likely know are Japanese (日本語), Korean (한국어), and Mandarin Chinese. The last one often appears as both Simplified Chinese (简体中文) and Traditional Chinese (繁體中文), and this is a common talking point for people who get confused by language options. Are these 2 different languages?

Well, no, to put it simply. "Simplified" and "traditional" refer exclusively to the writing systems themselves, which ARE used by multiple languages. However, as far as I know, these language options will generally refer exclusively to Mandarin Chinese written in 2 different forms.

Since these languages aren't related, I'll use both the words "ramen" and "bowl" as a comparison:

• Japanese: 拉麺 (rāmen), 鉢 (hachi)

• Korean: 라면 (lamyeon), 그릇 (geureut)

• Traditional Chinese: 拉麵 (lāmiàn), 碗 (wǎn) 

• Simplified Chinese: 拉面 (lāmiàn), 碗 (wǎn) 

Looking closely yields some very interesting notes! First of all, "ramen" is widely loaned between languages, so it sounds very similar between the 3 languages; it only differs because of the way each language interprets sounds. If you look at the writing, Traditional Chinese is generally more complicated than Simplified Chinese, but some symbols are shared anyway (the symbols for "bowl" are exactly the same!).

However, looking at the writing system shows something even weirder -- the word for "ramen" is written almost exactly the same between Traditional Chinese and Japanese! That's because Japanese actually uses many symbols borrowed directly from Chinese, which makes some words actually readable between both languages. Korean used to use Chinese symbols too, before they developed their own writing system; this is why it looks so distinct in comparison.

Still, each of these languages are in separate language families. Japanese is Japonic, Korean is Koreanic, and Mandarin Chinese is Sino-Tibetan, which encompasses all the Chinese languages, along with Burmese and the Tibetic languages. Why don't we hear about the other Japonic and Koreanic languages? Well, most of them simply died out.

Other Languages (Turkish, Basque, Thai, Esperanto)

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