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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. For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties, and so ...
There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for ...
The language was widely spoken until the United States entered World War I. In the early twentieth century, German was the most widely studied foreign language in the United States, and prior to World War I , more than 6% [ citation needed ] of American schoolchildren received their primary education exclusively in German, though some of these ...
English is one of the official languages under the constitution and is commonly used in education and administration. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] According to statistics from various sources, the English-speaking population ranges from 88.69 million [ 11 ] to 108 million, [ 12 ] [ 13 ] accounting for 49% to 58% of the total population.
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.
Below are the top foreign languages studied in American institutions of higher education (i.e., colleges and universities), based on the Modern Language Association's census of fall 2021 enrollments. "Percentage" refers to each language as a percentage of total U.S. foreign language enrollments. [3]: 49
Spanish is by far the most common second language in the country, with over 50 million total speakers if non-native or second-language speakers are included. [44] While English is the de facto national language of the country, Spanish is often used in public services and notices at the federal and state levels.
The languages of North America reflect not only that continent's indigenous peoples, but the European colonization as well. The most widely spoken languages in North America (which includes Central America and the Caribbean islands) are English, Spanish, and to a lesser extent French, and especially in the Caribbean, creole languages lexified by them.