The language spoken by the people is a special system that includes not only a set of signs, but also reflects the history, development of the people, and its characteristics. It is believed that each language has a certain set of words that are used most often and reflect the worldview of the people. In total, there are about 7 thousand languages in the world, let's talk about the 15 most common.
15. Marathi - 95.3 million speakers
Marathi is a language that has existed for a thousand years. It is popular in India and Mauritius, and is spreading around the world thanks to Indian expats. The Marathi-speaking people love theater, are intellectually developed, aiming at getting results, but are weak in commerce.
14. Swahili - 98.5 million speakers
Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, spoken in Congo, Madagascar, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Somalia, Burundi and the Comoros. The main feature of the language is that it exists separately from a certain people - in fact, it is a mixture of dialects of African tribes, Arabic and Portuguese.
13. Japanese - 126.4 million speakers
Japanese, ranked 13th, is the official language of Japan + spoken in Brazil, Peru, California and Hawaii. Speaking is much simpler than writing: it takes a lot of attention and effort to master the three-system writing. Another feature is that both vertical and horizontal writing are practiced in equal degrees.
12. German - 131.6 million speakers
German is the official language of Germany , Luxembourg, Sweden , Belgium, Liechtenstein and Australia . Some interesting facts:
- All nouns are capitalized
- The word "girl" is neuter
- There are concepts that are absent in the languages of the world, which cannot be translated in one word - only in a whole sentence.
11. Urdu - 170.6 million speakers
Urudu is the official language in Pakistan and India, one of the languages of the Gulf countries, Great Britain, the USA and Australia. Urdu is a Muslim version of Hindi, so it is mainly spoken by Muslims. If you know Hindi, it is likely that understanding an Urdu speaker is not difficult.
10. Indonesian - 199 million speakers
Indonesian is a young language that emerged in the first half of the 20th century. The language is growing and expanding at a rapid pace: today it is recognized as the language of interethnic communication and has managed to acquire 700 dialects. Borrowings from Portuguese, Arabic and Dutch are prevalent.
9. Portuguese - 252.2 million speakers
Portuguese is spoken by residents of Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Angola and the Commonwealth of Portuguese-speaking countries. It is similar to Spanish: Spaniards do not understand spoken language well, but they can understand writing. By the way, Brazilian is the language spoken by the majority of Brazilians today, and it is a dialect of Portuguese.
8. Russian - 258 million speakers
Russian is the official language of the Russian Federation, one of the state languages in Belarus, Moldova, South Ossetia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Abkhazia. Residents of the countries of the former USSR (Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, etc.) in theory will be able to understand Russian because of the widespread Russian diaspora living in them. The Russian language is considered one of the most difficult in the world; foreign people need a lot of time and patience to learn it.
7. Bengali - 265.2 million speakers
Bengali is spoken by residents of Bangladesh and some states of India. The language has been influenced for a long time, so it contains many borrowings from European, Arabic and Persian languages. The main feature is the direction of the letter from left to right.
6. Arabic - 274 million speakers
Arabic is recognized as the official language of all Arab countries. There are practically no borrowed words in it. Despite the small number of letters - 28 - the Arabs managed to come up with many words and expressions, dispensing with borrowings. Interestingly, it lacks capital letters and underscores; the latter replace "overlines".
5. French - 276.6 million speakers
The inhabitants of France, Canada, Belgium and some African countries speak French. For a long time (6 centuries), French was the official language of England (!), So a significant part of English words have French roots, and on the coat of arms of Great Britain there is an inscription in French: "God and my right."
4. Spanish - 537.9 million speakers
The Spanish language, in addition to Spain, is spoken in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia and other countries. Its peculiarity is that the Spanish language has practically no dialects, it is homogeneous. Exclamation marks and question marks are placed at the beginning of a sentence.
3. Hindi - 637.3 million speakers
The TOP-3 opens in Hindi, spread in India, Pakistan and Fiji. The date of the formation of the language is unknown, but it has 48 official dialects. Written speech is read from left to right, there are no capital letters.
2. Chinese - 1.12 billion speakers
Chinese is the main language of China; it is spoken in Taiwan and Singapore, the USA, Indonesia and Thailand, India and Russia. The hieroglyphic writing system in Chinese deserves special attention: hieroglyphs are written from left to right, from the middle of the 20th century, mostly horizontally. Another difficulty in learning Chinese is tonality: the tone with which a word is pronounced can drastically change its meaning.
1. English - 1.268 billion speakers
The undisputed leader is English, which is spoken in more than 60 countries around the world. What is the reason for its popularity?
- Use on the vast majority of electronic devices, applications, browsers, programs, etc.
- The popularity of cinema and music in English
- The weighty position of the English-speaking countries in the world arena.
