Tongue.si
Explore the world's languages, mother tongues, and how they connect
Tongue.si is a guide to the world's languages and linguistics - language families, phonetics, writing systems, and endangered mother tongues. Ask about any language and see how it fits into the bigger picture.
No card required · $9/mo Plus · $99/mo Premium
What you get
Everything Tongue.si gives you
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Language family trees
See how thousands of languages connect back through history.
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Sounds and scripts
Phonetics, alphabets, and writing systems explained with real examples.
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Endangered languages
Learn about languages at risk and the efforts to revive them.
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Saved study threads
Sign in free and keep every conversation for later study.
Go deeper
The World's Languages and Language Families
Reference material on language families, phonetics, writing systems, and linguistic diversity.
Major language families
- Indo-European — Over 3 billion speakers; includes English, Spanish, Hindi, and Russian, tracing to a common ancestor.
- Sino-Tibetan — Includes Mandarin and other Chinese varieties plus Tibetan and Burmese, over 1.4 billion speakers.
- Niger-Congo — Africa's largest family by speaker count, including Swahili, Yoruba, and Zulu, over 1,500 languages.
- Austronesian — Spans from Madagascar to Hawaii and Easter Island, including Tagalog, Malay, and Maori.
Sound and script
- Tonal languages — Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Yoruba use pitch to distinguish word meaning, not just stress.
- Click consonants — Found in languages like Xhosa and Zulu, produced by a suction motion of the tongue.
- Alphabets vs syllabaries vs logograms — Latin script is alphabetic, Japanese kana is syllabic, and Chinese hanzi are largely logographic.
Language change and contact
- Loanwords — English borrowed heavily from French after 1066 and continues absorbing words from many languages.
- Creoles and pidgins — New languages that form when groups without a common tongue develop shared communication, like Haitian Creole.
- Bilingualism and code-switching — How multilingual speakers mix and switch languages mid-conversation, a normal and structured behavior.
Endangered and revived languages
- Welsh — Once declining, now taught in schools and spoken by over 500,000 people in Wales today.
- Hawaiian — Revived through immersion schools after near-extinction in the 20th century.
- UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages — Tracks thousands of languages at risk of disappearing within generations.
Pricing
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Plus
$9/mo
- ✓200 questions per day
- ✓Full saved conversation history
- ✓Language family reference charts
Premium
$99/mo
- ✓Unlimited questions
- ✓Extended deep-dive answers
- ✓Everything in Plus