ENGLISH AND WORLD LANGUAGES
Learn about world languages and where English is spoken
Languages of the world
According to Ethnologue, there are currently 7,102 living languages for a world population of more than 7,000,000,000 people.
Most languages belong to language families. A language family is a group of related languages that developed from a common historic ancestor. For example, Romance languages such as Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese and others are related because they all originated from Latin. They are a branch of the Indo-European family together with other branches such as the Germanic and Slavic ones.
Según Ethnologue, actualmente hay 7.102 lenguas vivas para una población mundial de más de 7.000.000.000 de personas.
La mayoría de las lenguas pertenecen a una familia de idiomas. Una familia lingüística es un grupo de lenguas relacionadas que se desarrollaron a partir de un antepasado histórico común. Por ejemplo, las lenguas romances como el español, el catalán, el italiano, el francés, el portugués y otras están relacionadas porque todos ellas proceden del latín. Son una rama de la familia indoeuropea junto con otras ramas tales como las germánicas y eslavas.
English is a language of Germanic origin that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now a global lingua franca. It is an official language in almost 60 sovereign states around the world and it is the most commonly spoken language in the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), the United States, Canada, Australia, the Republic of Ireland and New Zealand. It is also widely spoken in countries in the Caribbean, Africa and southeast Asia. It is the third most common native language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
World languages (approx. number of speakers in millions)
LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world. The number of speakers of the different languages is based on estimates as census methods in different countries vary and some countries do not record language in their censuses. You can check different statistics on the webquest page and the Internet, then try to organize the languages below according to their number of speakers:
Italian / Spanish / Japanese / German / Chinese
VIDEOS
History of English
Why is English spelling so weird?
Is English a Germanic language?
Why is English spelling so strange?
