Have Fun with Languages

If you love learning foreign languages too

Do you love language learning?

What’s your native language?

Do you speak another language besides your mother tongue?

How many foreign languages can you speak?

What is your favorite foreign language?

“A different language is a different vision of Life.” — Federico Fellini

Language learning is my favorite hobby, bar none. If I could only do three things, they would be reading, writing, and language learning. However, if there is only one thing that I am allowed to do, I won’t hesitate to choose language learning.

I have been learning quite some languages, both foreign languages, and dialects in my country. Great fun — they have opened doors before me to different worlds.

Below I have gathered some information and fun facts about languages, mainly related to foreign languages.

Have fun with languages, if you love learning languages too.

1. How many languages are there in the world?

According to Ethnologue.com, 7,139 languages are spoken today; Roughly 40% of the world’s languages (3,018 languages) are endangered today; 2200 languages are in Asia.

2. Which languages are most spoken?

According to The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO):

(1) Mandarin Chinese; (2) English; (3) Spanish; (4) Hindi; (5) Arabic; (6) Bengali; (7) Russian; (8) Portuguese; (9) Japanese; (10) German

*source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/guide/languages.shtml

*I am dubious about this list though — (11) French?

According to Statistica.com, the top 10 most spoken languages are:

* Top languages by population — Ethnologue (2021, 24th edition), total speakers (L1+L2)

(1) English — 1,348 million

(2) Chinese (Mandarin) — 1,120 million

(3) Hindi — 600 million

(4) Spanish — 543 million

(5) Arabic (standard) — 274 million

(6) Bengali — 268 million

(7) French — 267 million

(8) Russian — 258 million

(9) Portuguese — 258 million

(10) Urdu — 230 million

*Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/

Despite the different ranking methodologies, both standards agree the top 4 most spoken languages are Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi.

• Mandarin — 921.2 million native speakers
• English — 369.9 million native speakers
• Spanish — 471.4 million native speakers
• Hindi — 342.2 million native speakers

3. UN’s 6 official languages and the language days

The United Nations uses six official languages to conduct business: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.

Language Days at the UN (listed in alphabetical order):

• Arabic (18 December)
• Chinese (20 April)
• English (23 April)
• French (20 March)
• Russian (6 June)
• Spanish (23 April)

According to the Portugal News, “World Portuguese Language Day will be celebrated annually on 5 May, a declaration from UNESCO”, “This is the first time UNESCO has made such a decision on a language that is not one of the official languages of UNESCO.”

*Source: https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/unesco-approves-world-portuguese-language-day/51718

4. Did you know the EU has 23 official languages?

As of 2010, the EU has 23 official working languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish.

5. Which languages are disappearing?

“Every year the world loses around 25 mother tongues.” — Foundation for Endangered Languages

*Foundation for Endangered Languages — https://www.ogmios.org/

6. Did you know that (most) languages belong to a family?

A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another. The best-known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.

7. Major language families:

Ethnologue 24 (2021) lists the following families as containing at least 1% of the 7,139 known languages in the world:

Niger–Congo (1,542 languages) (21.7%)

Austronesian (1,257 languages) (17.7%)

Trans–New Guinea (482 languages) (6.8%)

Sino-Tibetan (455 languages) (6.4%)

Indo-European (448 languages) (6.3%)

Australian [dubious] (381 languages) (5.4%)

Afro-Asiatic (377 languages) (5.3%)

Nilo-Saharan [dubious] (206 languages) (2.9%)

Oto-Manguean (178 languages) (2.5%)

Austroasiatic (167 languages) (2.3%)

Tai–Kadai (91 languages) (1.3%)

Dravidian (86 languages) (1.2%)

Tupian (76 languages) (1.1%)

*source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families

Reference

• https://www.ethnologue.com/https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/guide/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangered_language
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families

Last question:

Which language do you most want to learn if you don’t need to worry about money, time, or anything?

Please share your joy with a comment.

*This article was inspired by a casual reading this morning. When I learned English was the 4th language of @Anangsha Alammyan, I felt like writing down the above fun facts about the world languages.

Here is Ana’s article that touched me: