Old World Language Families Tree by Minna Sundberg

Key points from the tree

• Minna Sundberg drew this tree for her webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, published on 14 October 2014, to show where the Nordic languages sit among the Old World language families [1].
• Two separate trees grow from the page: the large Indo-European family and the much smaller Uralic family. They are not related.
• Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese hang from the North Germanic branch of Indo-European. Finnish and Estonian are Finnic languages in the Uralic tree, alongside Hungarian.
• The size of each leaf cluster stands for the number of native speakers, so English, Hindi, Spanish and Russian are huge and Faroese is tiny.
• Sundberg took the data mainly from Ethnologue and left out most languages with under a million speakers that have no official status anywhere [1].

Old world language families in text

Title block: A Comprehensive Overlook of the Nordic Languages in Their Old World Language Families. Sizes of the branches represent the recorded native speakers before year 0. The trees are drawn in black ink with blue leaf clusters on a parchment background, with black cats and birds sitting in the branches.

Indo-European, Indo-Iranian limb

• Iranian: Ossetian, Pashto, Talysh, Dimli, Gilaki, Baluchi, Kurdish, Persian, Hazaragi, Tajiki, Luri, Likai.
• Indo-Aryan (Indic): Mina, Sinhala, Maldivian, Sanskrit, Bhili, Bhilali, Wagadi.
• Eastern zone: Bengali-Assamese (Bengali, Assamese, Sylheti, Rangpuri, Chittagonian, Rohingya, Oriya) and Bihari (Bhojpuri, Maithili, Magahi, Sadri).
• East central zone: Chhattisgarhi, Bagheli, Awadhi, Fijian Hindi.
• Southern zone: Konkoni, Goan, Deccan, Marathi.
• Central zone: Hindi, Urdu, Romani.
• Northern zone: Nepali, Kumaoni, Garhwali, Dogri, Kangri, Mandeali, Mahasui.
• Northwestern zone: Sindhi, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Seraiki, Mirapuri, Hindko.

Indo-European, European limb

• Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Macedonian, Bulgarian.
• Baltic: Lithuanian, Latvian. Albanian: Albanian. Armenian: Armenian. Hellenic: Greek.
• Celtic: Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, Breton.
• Romance (Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Iberian and Italo-Dalmatian branches): Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Occitan, French, Walloon, Italian, Neapolitan-Calabrian, Sicilian, Corsican, Sardinian, Venetian, Piemontese, Emiliano, Ligurian, Lombard, Romansch, Romanian.
• West Germanic: High German (German, Luxemburgish, Limburgish, Mainfränkisch, Saxon, Swabian, Hunsrik, Bavarian, Swiss, Yiddish), Low German, Anglo-Frisian (English, Frisian, Scots) and Low Franconian (Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans).
• North Germanic: Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian.

Uralic

• Finno-Ugric: Finnic (Finnish, Estonian), Sami, Mari, Moksha, Erzya, Komi, Udmurt, and Ugric (Hungarian, Khanty).
• Samoyedic is a separate branch.

Lower half

Two framed world maps show the historic spread of Indo-European with North Germanic highlighted, and of Uralic with Finnic highlighted. Below them a mirrored root tree, drawn in white on dark blue water, shows the Nordic languages under their own names: Dansk, Norsk, Svenska, Íslenska and Føroyskt on the Germanic side, and Suomi and Eesti on the Uralic side with Karelian, Ludian, Vepsian, Livvi, Ingrian, Vod, Livonian, Võro, Sami, Moksha, Erzya, Mari, Udmurt and Komi. Captions: The approximate sizes of our known living language populations, compared to year 0. Some skalds also retain the ability to decipher various other Old World languages.

How language families work

A language family is a group of languages descended from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family [3]. All Indo-European languages descend from a single reconstructed prehistoric language, Proto-Indo-European [4]. Over 3.4 billion people, about 42% of the world’s population, speak an Indo-European language as their first language, by far the most of any family [4].

The Uralic family is much smaller. Its largest languages by native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian, and other Uralic languages with over 100,000 speakers, such as Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi, are spoken in European Russia [5]. That is why Finnish sits on a different tree from Swedish, even though the two are neighbours.

About the comic

Stand Still. Stay Silent is a Finnish webcomic by Minna Sundberg that ran from 2013 to 2022, set in a post-apocalyptic Scandinavia [6]. The tree appeared as part of a set of information pages. On the page before it, Sundberg explains that the Scandinavian languages are similar enough for some of her characters to talk to each other without sharing a language, while another, Lalli, “has to get by with the most impenetrable language barrier there ever was” [2]. The captions about “year 0” and “skalds” are written from inside the comic’s story world.

Notes on this infographic

• Not every language. The artist says most languages with under one million speakers and no official status were left out for space [1].
• Story captions. “Before year 0” and the skalds caption refer to the comic’s fictional setting, not to the year 0 of the calendar.
• Speaker sizes. The leaf sizes are drawn approximately, so they show rough scale rather than exact counts.

Questions about old world language families

Which is the most geographically widespread major language family of the world?

Indo-European. It has more first language speakers than any other family, over 3.4 billion people [4], and the tree’s left map shows its historic spread across Europe, South Asia, the Americas and Australia.

What are languages grouped into families based on?

Common descent. Languages belong to the same family when they descend from a shared ancestor, the proto-language [3]. Regular sound changes between languages are among the strongest evidence used to show they are related [3].

Which language family does Finnish belong to?

Finnish belongs to the Uralic family, not to Indo-European. On Minna Sundberg's tree, Finnish and Estonian are Finnic languages in the Uralic tree, alongside Hungarian, and the largest Uralic languages by native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian [5]. That is why Finnish sits on a different tree from Swedish, even though the two are neighbours.

What are the North Germanic languages?

The North Germanic languages are Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese. On the tree Minna Sundberg drew for her webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, published on 14 October 2014, they hang from the North Germanic branch of Indo-European [1]. The lower half of the tree shows them under their own names: Dansk, Norsk, Svenska, Íslenska and Føroyskt.

Sources

1. Minna Sundberg, Stand Still. Stay Silent, page 196 (14 October 2014), the original page with this tree.
2. Minna Sundberg, Stand Still. Stay Silent, page 195 (13 October 2014).
3. Wikipedia, Language family.
4. Wikipedia, Indo-European languages.
5. Wikipedia, Uralic languages.
6. Wikipedia, Stand Still, Stay Silent.
7. Bored Panda, This Amazing Tree That Shows How Languages Are Connected (22 September 2017).

Last reviewed 30 October 2026