Serbian Arabic official , Berber languages Tamazight official , Tachelhit, Tarifit , French often the language of business, government, and diplomacy. Makhuwa Oshiwambo languages Nepali official English de facto official Macedonian official Bokmal Norwegian official , Nynorsk Norwegian official , small Sami- and Finnish-speaking minorities. Palauan official on most islands Spanish official and Guarani official Kinyarwanda official, universal Bantu vernacular Samoan Polynesian official Serbian official Seychellois Creole official Slovak official Slovene official Dutch official , English widely spoken , Sranang Tongo Surinamese, sometimes called Taki-Taki, is the native language of Creoles and much of the younger population and is lingua franca among others , Caribbean Hindustani a dialect of Hindi , Javanese.
German or Swiss German official Mandarin Chinese official , Taiwanese Min Nan , Hakka dialects, approximately 16 indigenous languages. Kiswahili or Swahili official , Kiunguja name for Swahili in Zanzibar , English official, primary language of commerce, administration, and higher education , Arabic widely spoken in Zanzibar , many local languages.
Thai official only French official, the language of commerce , Ewe and Mina the two major African languages in the south , Kabye sometimes spelled Kabiye and Dagomba the two major African languages in the north. Tongan and English English official language, taught in schools, used in courts of law and by most newspapers and some radio broadcasts , Ganda or Luganda most widely used of the Niger-Congo languages and the language used most often in the capital , other Niger-Congo languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, Swahili official , Arabic.
Ukrainian official Vietnamese official , English increasingly favored as a second language , some French, Chinese, and Khmer, mountain area languages Mon-Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. Bemba Shona official; most widely spoken , Ndebele official, second most widely spoken , English official; traditionally used for official business , 13 minority languages official; includes Chewa, Chibarwe, Kalanga, Koisan, Nambya, Ndau, Shangani, sign language, Sotho, Tonga, Tswana, Venda, and Xhosa.
The Best Chairs Around. Spending a lot of time indoors? See also:. There have been many other examples of genocide and forced assimilation throughout history that have placed minority language speakers in even more oppressive circumstances.
But even if a local language is not regarded as inferior, increased mobility and globalization are contributing toward the disappearance of languages — and by the way, so is climate change. If these two decide to start a family together, chances are high that their children will not grow up with all four languages. Moreover, maintaining a language is also a question of cost for a nation. Not every country can afford to maintain an entire public apparatus and mass media in two languages, let alone several languages.
We only need to think of all the public signs, forms, applications, administrators, police officers, doctors, newspapers, television channels…the list is endless.
All of these things would have to be multilingual, or the people concerned would at least have to have extensive knowledge of the other languages. However, one academic database currently lists extinct languages. A great example of preserving a language can be found in Toulouse in the south of France.
As the capital of the region of Occitania, the metro system was set up in two languages: all stops are announced in French and then in Occitan, a Romance language with only about , native speakers left in France. And Occitan often does not sound so different from French, perhaps a bit like a mix of French and Spanish. Although in the future, fewer and fewer people will grow up learning Occitan as their native language, it is still at least possible this way to ensure that it remains a second language in this region thanks to these kinds of initiatives.
There are also numerous organizations deep in the trenches of language revitalization work, such as Wikitongues and the Endangered Langauge Alliance. Try Babbel. Toggle Menu. Ready to learn? Pick a language to get started! One might suppose, therefore, that linguists would have a clear and reasonably precise notion of how many languages there are in the world. It turns out, however, that there is no such definite count—or at least, no such count that has any status as a scientific finding of modern linguistics.
The reason for this lack is not just that parts of the world such as highland New Guinea or the forests of the Amazon have not been explored in enough detail to ascertain the range of people who live there. Rather, the problem is that the very notion of enumerating languages is a lot more complicated than it might seem. There are a number of coherent but quite different answers that linguists might give to this apparently simple question. When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit.
When we look at reference works, we find estimates that have escalated over time. The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, implies a figure somewhere around 1,, a number that climbs steadily over the course of the twentieth century.
That is not due to any increase in the number of languages, but rather to our increased understanding of how many languages are actually spoken in areas that had previously been underdescribed. Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics , now known as SIL International with an interest in translating the Christian Bible.
As of , at least a portion of the bible had been translated into 2, different languages, still a long way short of full coverage. 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.
Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated languages spoken by a population of around 3.
That makes the average number of. Photo credit: Minna Sundberg. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.
We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the way places. Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed apart from the status of French in Canada in terms of English vs.
Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre-contact times, over languages were spoken in North America.
Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English , Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families.
When a language ceases to be learned by young children, its days are clearly numbered , and we can predict with near certainty that it will not survive the death of the current native speakers. The situation in North America is typical.
Of about indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by as many as 10, people. About 75 are spoken only by a handful of older people, and can be assumed to be on their way to extinction. While we might think this is an unusual fact about North America, due to the overwhelming pressure of European settlement over the past years, it is actually close to the norm.
Some would say that the death of a language is much less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are there not instances of languages that died and were reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a group abandons its native language, it is generally for another that is more economically advantageous to them: why should we question the wisdom of that choice?
But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the language was not in fact abandoned over the many years when it was no longer the principal language of the Jewish people. During this time, it remained an object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And there are few if any comparable cases to support the notion that language death is reversible.
Where there is no one dominant local language, and groups with diverse linguistic heritages come into regular contact with one another, multilingualism is a perfectly natural condition. This is not a necessary step, however, for them to become participants in a larger economic or political order.
0コメント