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This is a list of languages arranged by age of the oldest existing text recording a complete sentence in the language. It does not include undeciphered writing systems , though there are various claims without wide acceptance, which, if substantiated, would push backward the first attestation of certain languages.
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.
Only two people remembered the language in 1961. after 1961: Xocó: unclassified: Sergipe, Alagoas, Brazil: Only a few people remembered the language in 1961 It is not clear if this is a single language. 1961: Northeastern Pomo: Pomoan(Hokan?) California, United States: 1960: Oriel dialect, Irish: Indo-European: Ireland: with the death of Annie ...
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties , such as Arabic , Lahnda , Persian , Malay , Pashto , and Chinese .
He is famous for claiming to speak more than fifty languages, and for a time was listed in The Guinness Book of Records. It is unclear how many languages he can in fact speak. [219] Andrew Divoff (1955–), Venezuelan actor and producer. He speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, English, German, and Russian. [220]
a Proto-human language, the hypothetical, most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages; the date of attestation in writing . see list of languages by first written accounts. the conservative nature of a given language (low rate of language change, viz. "old" in the sense of "has not changed much for a long time"), see
In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue , with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...