LANGUAGE
People communicate through language, whether the words are spoken or written down. Today, there are some 7,000 different languages spoken around the globe. Many more languages were spoken in the past, which have now been forgotten. The languages of the most powerful economic and political nations are spoken by millions of people.
- Chinese 1.3 billion people are native speakers of one of the family of Chinese languages. Some 880 million people communicate in Mandarin Chinese, a group of dialects (language variations) from northern and southwestern China.
- French Spoken by 220 million people worldwide, French is an official language of the United Nations. It is one of the family of Romance languages, which developed from Latin.
- Hebrew The holy language of the Jewish faith, Hebrew is spoken by 9 million people around the world. Many religious texts are written in an ancient form of Hebrew, in use from the 12th to the 6th century BCE.
- Arabic Some 300 million people communicate with a dialect of Arabic, a family of very old languages closely related to Hebrew. The Qu’ran, the holy book of the Islamic faith, is written in Arabic.
- Hindi The family of languages spoken in northern and central India is known as Hindi. As well as 425 million native speakers, there are many Indians who use Hindi as a second language.
- Portuguese This Romance language originated in Portugal, but spread to parts of South America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Today, it has 230 million speakers Worldwide.
- Japanese Used by 130 million people, the Japanese language can be adapted by the speaker to show respect to someone, according to their age and social status.
- Spanish Originating in northern Spain, this romance language has 577 million speakers. It is widely spoken in Central and Southern America. Today, Mexico has the most Spanish speakers.
- Bengali Also known as Bangla, this language is India’s second most spoken language. Bengali is also used in other parts of southern Asia, with 230 million native speakers.
- Greek This ancient language has used the same alphabet since the 9th century BCE. Today, about 13 million speakers in Greece and Greek communities worldwide keep this language alive.
- Latin The language of the Roman Empire, Latin developed into the family of Romance languages, as well as lending its vocabulary to a number of other languages.
- Russian With 160 million native speakers and many more using it as a second language, Russian is an important language in Europe and one of six official languages of the United Nations.
- English This widely spoken language went global through British colonization. Today, there are 400 million native speakers, and it is the most used language on the Internet.
Picture Credit : Google
