Rennic languages

Rennic or Rennic–Kaeic is a language family comprising primarily the Rennyan language (also known as Rennic) and the Kaen language, as well as 11–16 (depending on varying definitions of language versus dialect) additional, possibly (and in some cases definitively) endangered languages. With just over 6 million speakers as of a 2020 estimate, 4.35 speak Rennyan, just under a million Kaen, and the remaining 650,000 one of the 11–16 remaining Rennic languages. Of the 6 million Rennic speakers, about 1 million (virtually all speakers of Rennyan) live or work abroad permanently or semi-permanently, leaving the domestic total at about 5 million. All Rennic languages hail from the Rennic Islands, which constitute the territory of the sovereign state of the Republic of Rennya, an island country in East Asia located approximately halfway between Japan's Ryukyu Islands and Mainland China. All Rennic languages use a writing system known as Renben, which combines Traditional Chinese characters with Hangul, the phonetic writing system used exclusively to write Korean.

Rennic languages, while a language family in their own right, are not considered to be related to any other extant (or known extinct) language family; thus, until the 1960s, when it was discovered that many dialects of Rennyan in fact constituted their own languages, Rennyan was considered to be a language isolate, which Proto-Rennic (the ancestor of all Rennic languages, which began to diverge circa the mid-7th century AD) is considered by historical linguists to indeed have been.