Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A spoken language is a form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages are produced with the body and hands.
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 . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
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.
The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 [5] and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. [6]
German was a widely spoken language in some American colonies, especially Pennsylvania, where a number of German-speaking Protestants and other religious minorities settled to escape persecution in Europe. Another wave of settlement occurred when Germans fleeing the failure of 19th-century German revolutions immigrated to the United States.
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
SIL International's Ethnologue: Languages of the World lists over 7,100 spoken and signed languages. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns codes for most languages; see ISO 639. List of ISO 639-1 codes – two-letter codes (184 major languages) List of ISO 639-2 codes – three-letter codes
English is the de facto national language of Australia, while Australia has no de jure official language, [19] English is the first language of the majority of the population, and has been entrenched as the de facto national language since European settlement, being the only language spoken in the home for 72% of Australians. [20]