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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 ...
Ethnologue (2024) 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 ...
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. [43] 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.
Ñ-shaped animation showing flags of some countries and territories where Spanish is spoken. Spanish is the official language (either by law or de facto) in 20 sovereign states (including Equatorial Guinea, where it is official but not a native language), one dependent territory, and one partially recognized state, totaling around 442 million people.
In the 16th century, as the Spanish colonization of the Americas was beginning, the phoneme now represented by the letter j had begun to change its place of articulation from palato-alveolar [ʃ] to palatal [ç] and to velar [x], like German ch in Bach (see History of Spanish and Old Spanish language). In southern Spanish dialects and in those ...
The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. [1]
The majority of languages of Spain [4] belong to the Romance language family, of which Spanish is the only one with official status in the whole country. [5] [6] Others, including Catalan/Valencian (in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands) and Galician (in Galicia), enjoy official status in their respective autonomous regions, similar to Basque in the northeast of the country (a non ...
There are an estimated 474.7 million native Spanish speakers and about 100 million second and foreign language speakers around the world as of 2022, totaling 574 million Hispanophones in total. [2] This makes Spanish the second most natively spoken language and fourth most spoken language overall globally. The vast majority of Hispanophones are ...