Language is not just a way of communication, it is the very essence of a person. It is through language that we form our thoughts. And the languages of the world are different from each other. And they have interesting features.
There are 6,809 “living” languages in the world today. Most of them are in Asia and Africa. But there is one caveat – they are rare and endangered. For example, only 100,000 people out of 7.5 billion people on the planet speak 90% of the languages. But on common ones – 66%.
Most of the world’s native speakers of Chinese. In second place is Hindi, in third is Spanish. Fourth and fifth places are occupied by English and Arabic, respectively.
One of the oldest is considered the Greek alphabet, but it is very far from the top of the list in terms of prevalence.
Nevertheless, 80% of all world information is stored in English. More than half of the technical and scientific publications in the world are published on it.
The easiest language, it turns out, is considered Finnish. On it, the sound of all letters is always the same – as it is heard, so it is written. Although its grammar is much more complicated than English – there are only 15 cases.
About 700 languages are spoken on the territory of Papua New Guinea, which is approximately 15% of their total number in the world.
However, the most multilingual country is India. The population of this country speaks 845 languages and dialects.
In many countries, several languages have official status at once. Again, India is the leader in this issue – 17 languages. In second place is South Africa with 12 languages.
One day, people were struck by a brilliant idea: why not create a language that the whole world will speak! This is how the artificial international language ESPERANTO was created. It happened in 1887 with the light hand of the Warsaw doctor Zamenhof.
Icelandic is the language that has changed the least in recent centuries. It almost completely lacks any borrowings.
- The shortest alphabet in the world among the natives of the island of Bougainville – only 11 letters
- In second place is the Hawaiian alphabet – there are 12 letters
- The longest alphabet in the world is Cambodian, 74 letters
The Sedang language spoken in Vietnam has fifty vowels.
Every week, one language disappears from the world. In most cases, both the people speaking it and its culture go down in history with it. According to linguists and forecasts,
90% of the world’s languages are endangered! In 25 years, only 1/10 of the existing
Now there are 46 languages in the world that are spoken by only one person each. Well, for example, in the Caucasus there are languages spoken by only three or four people. If these people do not pass on their knowledge to others, such languages will soon disappear.
But there are cases of salvation of languages. The most striking example of the second birth is Hebrew. It was considered “dead” for almost 2,000 years. Today, this language is spoken by 8 million people, including 5 million who use it as their main language.
It is believed that in order for a language to live and develop successfully, it is necessary that at least a million people speak it. There are only 250 of them in the world.
The English language has the richest vocabulary – about 10 million words, of which only 500 thousand are various terms.
Over 700 million learn English as a foreign language. For 320 million, English is their native language.
There is a language in the world (and the only one) that does not have a written form – the language of the Berbers in North Africa.
