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- DictionaryWorld lan·guage/wərld ˈlaNGɡwij/
noun
- 1. a language known or spoken in many countries: "English is now the world language"
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World language. A world language (sometimes global language, [1] : 101 rarely international language [2] [3]) is a language that is geographically widespread and makes it possible for members of different language communities to communicate. The term may also be used to refer to constructed international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto. [4]
Spanish. Spanish is the second most widely spoken world language. It is estimated to have around 437 million native speakers, 91 million second language speakers, and around 21 million foreign language speakers around the world. Spanish, which is spoken in North America, South America, Africa, and Europe, is the 2nd most common native tongue in ...
3. 980 million. Note: Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world if you count only native speakers (L1*). Varieties of Chinese are Mandarin or Putonghua (the official language in mainland China), Jin, Wu, Hui, Gan, Xiang (Hunanese), Min (Hokkien), Hakka, Yue (Cantonese) and Ping.
- Europe. 1.1 Indo-European. Most of Europe’s languages belong to the Indo-European family, which has the following branches: Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, and Tocharian.
- Africa. Africa’s extraordinary linguistic diversity is threatened by the possible extinction of half or more of its languages, which some predict by the end of the century due to competition from other languages.
- Asia. Asia is home to 60% of the world’s population and nearly 30% of the world’s languages. These are grouped into just a handful of major families, leaving out several important isolates, and due to long periods of contact, there’s less diversity than one might expect.
- Oceania. Oceania, which includes Australia and most of the island territories of the central and southern Pacific and Indian oceans, is home to the Austronesian family and to two very large language groups, the Australian and the Papuan groups.
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Mar 28, 2024 · Bolivia is the country with the most official languages with 37, but only one of those — Spanish — makes the top 10 list here, while the rest are mostly indigenous languages protected by official status. 1. English. 1.515 billion total speakers. 2.
Feb 22, 2024 · A world language is a language that is spoken by a relatively large number of people in countries around the world. In general, such languages are used over large geographic areas and in international business exchanges. The geographic distribution of speakers of a given language is at least as important as overall number of speakers of that ...
Feb 15, 2020 · Indo-European. 10. Indonesian. 199 million. Austronesian. However, this is only one piece in the full fabric of languages. The metrics for native speakers tell a slightly different tale, as Mandarin Chinese shoots up to 918 million —almost 2.5x that of English native speakers. Rank. Language.
