The language family template is for use in articles about language families and groupings. It provides a common standard for displaying data about the family, and for navigating to larger or smaller groups.
The familycolor parameter should always be set, and determines the color of template headings indicating the broad group of languages to which the family belongs. Some of these groups (e.g. Altaic, Caucasian) are areal groups rather than accepted language families. When these values are used, the parameter fam1 should be set to the broadest widely accepted language family containing this one, if any.
Name used in reference generated by certain 'ref' parameter values such as e19. It defaults to the value of the 'name' parameter or PAGENAME.
The appropriate language family for the purposes of determining the background color, chosen from a fixed set given in the documentation
The ISO 639-2 terminological code for the language family, (such as for "macrolanguages"). Can be 'none' or 'linglist'
Used for cleanup categories, excludes from the general 'missing language code' category if set to 'dialect', 'historical', 'protolanguage', or 'talkpage'