Starlings have diverse and complex vocalizations and have been known to embed sounds from their surroundings into their own calls, including car alarms and human speech patterns.

Other ornamentation includes elongated tail feathers and brightly coloured bare areas on the face.

The family is naturally absent from the Americas and from large parts of Australia, but it is present over the majority of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Like many other starling species, it has also adapted readily to human-modified habitat, including farmland, orchards, plantations, and urban areas.

[6] A persistent story alleges that Eugene Schieffelin, chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, decided all birds mentioned by William Shakespeare should be in North America, leading to the introduction of the starling to the U.S.; however, this claim is more fiction than fact.

Many species are important dispersers of seeds, in Asia and Africa, for example, white sandalwood and Indian banyan.

[10][11] The starlings belong to the superfamily Muscicapoidea, together with thrushes, flycatchers and chats, as well as dippers, which are quite distant relatives, and Mimidae (thrashers and mockingbirds).

The latter are apparently the Sturnidae's closest living relatives, replace them in the Americas, and have a rather similar but more solitary lifestyle.

The oxpeckers are sometimes placed here as a subfamily, but the weight of evidence has shifted towards granting them full family status as a more basal member of the Sturnidae-Mimidae group, derived from an early expansion into Africa.

This treatment was used by Zuccon et al.[13] However, the grouping of Sibley & Monroe is overly coarse due to methodological drawbacks of their DNA-DNA hybridization technique and most of their proposed revisions of taxonomic rank have not been accepted (see for example Ciconiiformes).

The all-inclusive Sturnidae grouping conveys little information about biogeography, and obscures the evolutionary distinctness of the three lineages.

Establishing a valid name for the clade consisting of Sibley/Monroe's "pan-Sturnidae" would nonetheless be desirable to contrast them with the other major lineages of Muscicapoidea.

Starlings probably originated in the general area of East Asia, perhaps towards the southwestern Pacific, as inferred by the number of plesiomorphic lineages to occur there.

An alternative scenario would be African origin for the entire "sturnoid" group,[13] with the oxpeckers representing an ancient relict and the mimids arriving in South America.

[13][14] As the fossil record is limited to quite Recent forms, the proposed Early Miocene (about 25–20 Mya) divergence dates for the "sturnoids" lineages must be considered extremely tentative.

[13] As of 2007,[update] recent studies[13][14] identified two major clades of this family, corresponding to the generally drab, often striped, largish "atypical mynas" and other mainly Asian-Pacific lineages, and the often smaller, sometimes highly apomorphic taxa which are most common in Africa and the Palearctic, usually have metallic coloration, and in a number of species also bright carotinoid plumage colors on the underside.

The Philippine creepers, a single genus of three species of treecreeper-like birds, appear to be highly apomorphic members of the more initial radiation of the Sturnidae.

This is apparently not entirely correct, with Scissirostrum closer to Aplonis than to Gracula, for example, and Acridotheres among the most advanced genera.