Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Sinitic languages [a] (simplified Chinese: 汉语族; traditional Chinese: 漢語族; pinyin: Hànyǔ zú), often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
The Germanic languages include some 58 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects that originated in Europe; this language family is part of the Indo-European language family. Each subfamily in this list contains subgroups and individual languages. The standard division of Germanic is into three branches: East Germanic languages; North Germanic ...
Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch originating from the Afrikaners of South Africa, with over 7.1 million native speakers; [6] Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [7 ...
The colloquial speech is a compromise between Standard German and the dialect. [13] Northern Germany (the Low German area) is characterized by a loss of dialects: standard German is the vernacular, with very few regional features even in informal situations. [12] In Central Germany (the Middle German area) there is a tendency towards dialect ...
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 number of speakers as a first or second language (L1 and L2 speakers) listed are speakers in Europe only; [nb 1] see list of languages by number of native speakers and list of languages by total number of speakers for global estimates on numbers of speakers. [citation needed] The list is intended to include any language variety with an ISO ...
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 only East Germanic language of which texts are known is Gothic, although a word list and some short sentences survive from the debatedly-related Crimean Gothic. Other East Germanic languages include Vandalic and Burgundian , though the only remnants of these languages are in the form of isolated words and short phrases.