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German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon says that what determines whether something is a world language is its "global function", which is to say its use for global communication, in particular between people who do not share it as a native language and with use as a lingua franca—i.e. in communication where it is not the native language of any of ...
The global language system is the "ingenious pattern of connections between language groups". [1] Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan developed this theory in 2001 in his book Words of the World: The Global Language System and according to him, "the multilingual connections between language groups do not occur haphazardly, but, on the contrary, they constitute a surprisingly strong and efficient ...
Researchers accept that there are multiple categories of language, even as they often disagree on the explicit number of those categories. De Swaan's analysis of the world language system, which is arguably the most common analysis, distinguishes between five different types of languages, one of which is "English as global lingua franca. [2]"
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. Other informative or qualifying ...
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, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic , other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. [ 1 ]
A language without its own territory, Romany (including the language of the Sinte people) is an official minority language as well. [204] Germany is home to large numbers of people from other regions, and some of their languages, such as Turkish, Russian, and Polish, are widely used throughout the country. However, those languages are ...
There are also cases of sign language pronouns indicating specific numbers of referents above five. Ugandan Sign Language has a rare pronoun form for exactly six people. [142] Some American Sign Language speakers have incorporated numerals up to nine into inclusive pronouns upon solicitation. [171]
The official languages of the United Nations are the six languages used in United Nations (UN) meetings and in which the UN writes all its official documents. [1]Five languages were chosen in 1946 as official languages around when the United Nations was founded: Chinese, [2] English (British English with Oxford spelling), [3] French, Russian, and Spanish.