Shortwave is a gold mine for linguistics junkies. On DXpeditions, I often try to hear 40 or 50 languages. I think I've come close-I need to keep better track.
I made schedules of languages that I'm interested in, representing many that are not heard in the US. I list a few unusual English broadcasts, such as some short AIR sports broadcasts. As with all skeds, mine seem to be forever incomplete. You can choose from Excel or text files, as listed below. They all contain the exact same information but just in different formats or ordered differently.
My skeds contain nearly all language families. I know of no transmissions from the Khoisan and Chuckchi-Kamchatkan families. The latter should be on some of the Russian Far East stations but I don't have a recent sked. I'll keep looking.
Most of the IE classifications are obvious. Languages spoken in Iran and India are a subgroup called Indo-Iranian, divided into Iranian and Indo-Aryan.
These are spoken in the Middle East and North Africa. Comrie's classification consists of Akkadian (extinct), Chadic, Semitic, Cushitic, and Berber. They all sound very similar and are difficult to miss. Hausa (Chadic) has more nasal sounds due to surrounding Niger-Kordofanian languages.
Comrie uses this term, which I'm used to. However, if you use the ethnologue website, the family is called Niger-Congo. Most languages are from the large Atlantic branch.
This is a small group of languages spoken in Sudan and Kenya. The most well known is Maasai.
Altaic is a large family consisting of three branches, all quite disparate. The largest branch is Turkic, which contains most Altaic languages besides Mongolian. Mongolian is its own branch, along with a few other languages. The third branch is Tungusic. There are a few Tungusic languages spoken in the Russian Far East. The most famous member is Manchu, which has very few speakers now, if any.
Dravidian languages are spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka. They are all similar, with very even intonation. A common phoneme is a tapped /r/ (I can't do proper notation), as in butter.
Comrie refers to this as Tai-Kadai. Other linguists call it simply Tai. The family consits of three branches-Tai, Kadai, and Kam-Sui. The latter two are spoken in Southern China and Northern Vietnam. They are not on shortwave.
This family consists of Mon-Khmer, Munda, and Nicobarese. The first subgroup include Khmer and Vietnamese, which is the only tonal language in the family. Santhali is the only Munda language on SW.
Miao and Yao are two separate groups. Miao is the collective name for several different languages. They are also known as Hmong or Ho Mong.
This family is divided into Sinitc (all Chinese langauges) and Tibeto-Burman, which is probably the most fragmented group of languages, excepting perhaps Indo-Pacific. This is a great group of languages to study because of their exotic names.
This family includes all languages spoken in the interior of the island of New Guinea. There are a few Austronesian languages spoken on the coasts.
Austronesian includes Hawaiian, Tahitian, etc. These form the major subgroup of Malay-Polynesian. A few, probably moribund, languages in the interior of Taiwan form a separate subgroup.
This large family consists of all American Indian and First Nations languages other than Navajo and Inuit. They are spoken from northern Canada and Alaska all the way down to Terra del Fuego in Chile.
In other words, Navajo, and some lesser known languages spoken by smaller groups. They are spoken along the mountains of the US and Canada. The term is pronounced Na-Dinay, emphasis on the last syllable.
Eskimo is properly called Inuit. It is also spoken by small groups in the Russian Far East. Greenlandic is a dialect of Inuit.
Most linguists consider Japanese and Korean to be isolated from each other and from other languages. Years ago a Korean friend from college said that the grammar was exactly like Korean. Ruhlen thinks there may be a relation between these languages and Altaic.
Creoles are pidgins spoken by the children of pidgin speakers. They are classified based on their superstrates, that is, the language of the dominating group. The second language is the substrate. In theory there are adstrates. Linguists like everything to add up neatly.
Esperanto is the only artificial language on shortwave.
The WRTH still contains IDs in several languages, useful for crib notes. I dislike the fact that the so called international section is separated from the home services. I share this criticism with most DXers. An old copy should suffice for ID purposes, however.
A standard in the linguistics field is Phonetics by Roger Laver. Once you discover a certain broadcast, it can help you tell the difference between an Indonesian /r/ from and Arabic /r/.
Along those lines, linguistics boooks that deal with phonetics and phonology have phoneme inventories for each languages. These are precise descriptions of each sound in phonetic notation, written in a table. Laver has carved out a career reading these symbols. A more concise guide, however, is the Phonetic Symbol Guide by Geoffrey Pullam and William Ladusaw.
For language classification, A Guide to the World's Languages by Merritt Ruhlen is good but considered radical in the linguistics world. He believes that most languages can be clumped into two huge groups, called the Nostratic or Eurasiatic hypothesis. He includes many standard classifications, however
The World's Major Languages by Bernard Comrie is a more straightforward and conservative book. This is my favorite.
The SIL International is a widely respected organization formerly known as the Summer Insitute for Linguistics. It has been involved in missionary work and language research. Both religious and secular linguists work with this group. You can look up languages on their affiliated site Ethnologue.
By the way, should you want to study Burmese, Australian National University is the place to go. It's a great school in which to study Southeast Asian languages and cultures.