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The word is a combination of multi-("many") and -lingual ("pertaining to languages"). [9] The phenomenon of multilingualism is as old as the very existence of different languages. [10] Today, evidence of multilingualism in an area includes things such as bilingual signs, which represent the same message in more than one language.
There are many regional languages and dialects (the latter are often unintelligible from other dialects of the "same language"). Many high-school and college educated Pakistanis are trilingual, being able to speak English and Urdu as well as their own regional language with varying fluency. Sri Lanka. Sinhala and Tamil are official languages ...
Number of living languages Number of speakers Established Immigrant Total Percent [note 1] Total Mean Median Papua New Guinea: 840 0 840 11.81 4,213,381 5,040 1,315 Indonesia: 707 2 709 9.98 222,191,197 315,165 3,500 Nigeria: 525 7 532 7.37 163,317,444 348,225 14,000 India: 453 6 459 ? 1,257,421,714 2,924,237 35,000 China (mainland only) 302 3 305
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 they are sometimes considered language families instead.
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]
The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. [3]
Plurilingualism is different from code-switching in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages, while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together. [2] Plurilinguals practice multiple languages and are able to switch between them when necessary without much difficulty. [3]
For languages written in other writing systems, write "Romanization - native script (language)", for example "Argentine - אַרגענטינע (Yiddish)", and alphabetize it in the list by the Romanized form. Due to its size, this list has been split into four parts: List of country names in various languages (A–C)