The 2,000 languages which are spoken in Asia are grouped into a range of language families, some of which are only to be found in Asia while others connect the continent with the rest of the world. The ones which are only to be found in Asia include:

• The Altaic family, which features languages such as Turkish, Mongol and Manchu.
• The Dravidian family, to be found in the south of India and Sri Lanka and which includes languages such as Tamil and Malayalam.
• The Sino-Tibetan family, which includes Chinese, Burmese and Tibetan among others.
• The Austro-Asiatic family, which contains Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer. Some authors link it with the Austronesian and Kam-Tai (Thai) families and put forward a large Austric group. 
• Finally there are the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, which are virtually extinct.

 The families which stretch beyond the continent are: 

• The Afro-Asiatic family, featuring Arabic as the most obvious link with Africa. 
• The Indo-European family, with languages such as Farsi, Kurdish, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Pashto, Nepalese, etc, which, together with the Uralic family – Ossetic, Mansi, Khanty –are the linguistic link with Europe. 
• The Eskimo-Aleut family –Yupik – links Asia with America. 
• The Austronesian family which includes languages such as Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog and Javanese, among others, and which connects Asia with Oceania. 

In addition to those languages which it has been possible to classify into linguistic families, there are others for which it has not proved possible to find clear relatives, such as Japanese, Korean, Ainu, Gilyak and Burushaski.

As far as numbers of language speakers are concerned, a wide variety of situations are to be found in Asia. They range from languages which have only a few speakers left, such as some in Siberia, to languages with the largest numbers of speakers in the world, such as Chinese and Hindi. It should be remembered that out of the five most-spoken languages in the world, three – Chinese, Hindi and Bengali – are Asian. 

In terms of status, in virtually all states in Asia the official languages are indigenous ones. This means that many local languages are threatened not by colonial languages as is often the case on other continents, but rather by the pressure of other local languages. Nevertheless, there are states in which languages such as English and French are also official. Hence English is co-official in a number of states such as India, Pakistan and Singapore, while French is recognised in states such as Cambodia and Vietnam. 

Asian languages have given a lot of words to other languages around the world, including typhoon, tea (Chinese), jungle, shampoo (Hindi), mango (Tamil), launch (Malay), bonsai (Japanese), spinach (Persian), kiosk (Turkish), lama (Tibetan), panda (Nepalese), and mammoth (Ossetic), in addition to many others.