Meanings of language families in English

But the language families closest to Austronesian are thought to be Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, and Miao-Yao.

In Chapter 15 I explained that most New Guinea languages , termed Papuan languages , are unrelated to any language families elsewhere in the world.

The other three families have fragmented distributions, being spoken by "islands" of people surrounded by a "sea" of speakers of Chinese and other language families.

From the initial indications of family-like relations up to the establishment of language families, the time span is greater than 15,000 years.