Most spoken languages | 5 most spoken languages
Languages have been evolving and diversifying over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their genetic languages must have had for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all.
Some academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.
Languages with most native speakers
Top 5 languages with most native speakers
1. Mandarin Chinese – (1.3 Billion+)
Mandarin Chinese is the largest language in the world when counting only first language (native) speakers. This is due to the significant population of China.
Mandarin is considered the largest of the Chinese macrolanguage, which is a grouping of thirteen languages all considered “Chinese” due to a shared writing system and literature. Other well-known examples include Wu and Cantonese.
2. Español – (471 Million+)
Español (Spanish) is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States, the African Union and many other international organizations. Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world. Despite its large number of speakers, Spanish does not feature prominently in scientific writing and technology, though it is better represented in the humanities and social sciences. Spanish is the fourth most used language on internet websites after English, Russian and Turkish.
3. English – (370 Million+)
English has the largest number of speakers in the world. It is also the third most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. It is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. More people have learned it as a second language than there are native speakers. As of 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English. English is the majority native language in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, an official and the main language of Singapore, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union and many other world and regional international organisations. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch. English speakers are called “Anglophones”. There is much variability among the many accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions—in terms of phonetics and phonology, and sometimes also vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and spelling— but it does not typically prevent understanding by speakers of other dialects and accents, although mutual unintelligibility can occur at extreme ends of the dialect continuum.
4. Hindi – (342 Million+)
Hindi, precisely Modern Standard Hindi and Indo-Aryan spoke chiefly in India. Hindi has been described as a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas of Northern India. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the two official languages of the Government of India, along with the English language. It is an official language in 9 States and 3 Union Territories and an additional official language in 3 other States. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.
Hindi is the lingua franca of the Hindi belt and to a lesser extent other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginised variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi). Outside India, several other languages are recognised officially as “Hindi” but do not refer to the Standard Hindi language described here and instead descend from other dialects, such as Awadhi and Bhojpuri. Such languages include Fiji Hindi, an official in Fiji, and Caribbean Hindustani, spoken in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname. Apart from the script and formal vocabulary, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with Standard Urdu, another recognised register of Hindustani as both share a common colloquial base.
5. Bengali – (300 Million+)
Bengali, also known by its endonym Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language and is the lingua franca of the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent. It is the most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India, after Hindi. With approximately 228 million native speakers and another 37 million as second language speakers, Bengali is the fifth most-spoken native language and the fifth most spoken language by a total number of native speakers in the world.
Information Source: Wikipedia
Image Credit:- Pexels | Pixabay | Unsplash
Make sure to Share this article and Follow me for more Interesting and Explained articles.