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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 ]
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. Current distribution of human language families All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum . [ 1 ]
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.
by name: List of language names (native names) by phylogenetic relation: List of language families (phylogenetic) by primary language family: List of Afro-Asiatic languages, List of Austronesian languages, List of Indo-European languages, List of Mongolic languages, List of Tungusic languages, List of Turkic languages, List of Uralic languages.
Note: Apart from Hong Kong, there are also Cantonese-speakers in southern Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore [1], so written Cantonese can be written in either Simplified or Traditional characters. Common characters in Vernacular Cantonese that do not occur or seldom occur in Mandarin: 嘅 咗 咁 嚟 啲 唔 佢 乜 嘢 嗰 冇 睇
Despite claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic ...
This article is a list of language families. This list only includes primary language families that are accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics ; for language families that are not accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics, see the article " List of proposed language families ".
English is the third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; [8] it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. English is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states (such as India, Ireland, and Canada).