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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). 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.
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 ...
Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. [4] It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu, and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. [5]
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.
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.
This category is for languages spoken in the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), whether indigenous or introduced by immigrants. The main article for this category is Languages of the United States .
In the United States, 372,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2010 census. [5] In Canada, 133,000 people reported speaking an Indigenous language at home in the 2011 census. [6] In Greenland, about 90% of the population speaks Greenlandic, the most widely spoken Eskaleut language.