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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 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.
Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch originating from the Afrikaners of South Africa, with over 7.1 million native speakers; [6] Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [7 ...
Five languages have more than 50 million native speakers in Europe: Russian, German, French, Italian, and English. Russian is the most-spoken native language in Europe, [4] and English has the largest number of speakers in total, including some 200 million speakers of English as a second or foreign language. (See English language in Europe.)
German is also widely taught as a foreign language, especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, [ 11 ] and the third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K-12 ...
Today German, together with French, is a common second foreign language in the western world, with English well established as a first foreign language. [5] [15] German ranks second (after English) among the best known foreign languages in the EU (on a par with French) [5] as well as in Russia. [16]
The following is a list of the countries and territories where German is an official language (also known as the Germanosphere). It includes countries that have German as (one of) their nationwide official language (s), as well as dependent territories with German as a co-official language.
Around the world, German has approximately 100 million native speakers and also about 80 million non-native speakers. [5] German is the main language of about 90 million people (18%) in the EU. 67% of German citizens claim to be able to communicate in at least one foreign language, 27% in at least two languages other than their first. [1]