A language family is a group of related languages, probably originating from a common primitive language.
In linguistics, a few dozen language families have been identified. These are in turn divided into smaller language groups.
Swedish belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and within this family, it belongs to the Germanic group of languages, and within this group, the subgroup of Nordic languages. Other examples of language families are Afro-Asiatic languages (e.g., Arabic), Altaic languages (e.g., Turkish), Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish) and Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Chinese).