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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 as a first language is only spoken by 259,678 people, as a second language by 182,717,239 and as a third language by 45,562,173. [4] Nigeria: 206,200,000 125,039,680: 60.64 20,000,000 9.70: 103,198,040 50.05: English is the most widespread language in the country due to the many different languages spoken, with 60 million speakers. [5]
This is first of all due to the question of defining "language" vs. "dialect". Identification of varieties as a single language or as distinct languages is often based on ethnic, cultural, or political considerations rather than mutual intelligibility. The second difficulty is multilingualism, complicating the definition of "native language".
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.
Around 1.06 million people in the United States speak the German language at home. [6] It is the second most spoken language in North Dakota (1.39% of its population) [7] and is the third most spoken language in 16 other states. [8]
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