According to biblical tradition, at the beginning of centuries, all people on the planet used the same language. The Lord punished the impudent apostates - the city plunged into chaos, and its inhabitants suddenly ceased to understand each other's speech.
Modern inhabitants of the Earth speak approximately 7,200 languages. The rarest of them are owned by only a few people, and the most popular are known to billions. Today on the agenda are the most common languages in the world (by the number of speakers). The rating is based on studies conducted in 2016 by employees of SIL International, the international Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Lahnda - tenth place (by the number of carriers)
Lahnd has about 117 million native speakers. An unpronounceable language belonging to the Indo-Aryan group of the Indo-European family is native to the inhabitants of the western regions of Pakistan (Punjab) and northern India. In 1947, the split of British India into sovereign states plunged the two emerging countries into the gloom of bloody clashes between Muslims and Indians. This caused a steady flow of refugees. About 5 million homeless people left their homes. As a result of the migration, Lahnda (or Landy) speakers today live in the UK, Canada, USA, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
Lahnda is one of the oldest languages on the planet. It originates from the cult Vedic language, which originated in the XII century BC. e. Modern literary speech was formed in the 19th century. She laid the foundation for the writers of Puran Singh, Bhaya Vir Singh and the poetess Amrita Pritam.
Japanese - ninth place
Japanese has 128 million native speakers. In addition to the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun, the official language of Japan is spoken by 12 million people. The largest Japanese-speaking groups outside the state can be found in the Philippines, Brazil, Peru, USA, South and North Korea. The speech of the ancient samurai is considered one of the most difficult. Missionaries who set foot on the shores of a new island nation in the 19th century called the Japanese language the invention of the devil.
The writing system is based on 2 alphabets (hiragana and katakana) having a different alphabet and characters borrowed from the Chinese (kanji). The difficulty of studying lies in understanding and remembering hieroglyphs, often representing independent words or images. Oral speech interferes pronunciation speed (7.84 syllables / second). At the same time, phonetically, Japanese is a meager language. With the exception of "n," there are no separate consonants (they are replaced by syllables).
Russian - eighth place
Russian has 171 million native speakers. The origins of the national language of Russians go back to the Indo-European proto-language. The first Slavic alphabet appeared in the 9th century thanks to the enlightening brothers Cyril and Methodius. Based on the Greek alphabet, they created 2 writing systems - the Glagolitic and Cyrillic, which we still use today. A huge role in the development and enrichment of speech was played by Kantemir, Lomonosov, Pushkin, Karamzin and Dahl.
"Great and mighty" is native to 71 million inhabitants of the planet. As a second language, it is spoken by 100 million people - residents of the former Soviet republics, Europe, Israel, the USA and Canada. Learning Russian speech requires strength and patience. Is it a joke, 2 conjugations, 3 declensions, 6 cases, an incredible number of endings, homonyms and paronyms! Add the letters "Ы", "Ш" and "Щ" that are unpronounceable for foreigners, and you will get a language that is one of the five most complex in the world.
Bengali - seventh place
Bengali has 189 million native speakers. Bengali (bangla, bengali) is the language of the inhabitants of Bangladesh and the states of India: Bihar, Assam, West Bengal and Orissa. In addition to the citizens of these countries, 61 million people understand Bengali. The ancestors of Bengal are Sanskrit and Prakrit.The first works in Bangla date back to the 10th century. The origins of writing go back to the Indian syllable Brahmi script, decrypted only at the end of the 18th century. Modern Bengali has 2 literary types:
- currently used cholty;
- archaic shadhu-bhasham - the language of official documents and scientific publications.
Along with the above forms, in Bengali there are 4 groups of dialects. They are so different that the inhabitants of the regions do not understand each other. There is also no similarity between everyday and conservative speech.
Portuguese - sixth place
Portuguese has 202 million native speakers. Born in 218 BC Portuguese has spread throughout the world thanks to expeditions by famous navigators of the 15th – 16th centuries who discovered previously unknown lands to Europeans. Apart from carriers (they are called luzophones), 38 million people speak it: residents of Portugal, Brazil, Goa, Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Macau and Principe. There are 2 varieties of Portuguese: Brazilian and European. Due to the increased economic status of Brazil, the language of Pele and Paulo Coelho is one of the most significant in the world.
Portuguese is part of a romance group and has many similarities with Spanish. In addition, the colonization policy and trade relations of sailors of the Age of Great Geographical Discoveries influenced the formation of the language. In modern Portuguese, borrowed words from English, German, Arabic and Swahili are found.
Hindi - fifth place
Hindi has 260 million native speakers. India has 23 official languages. On the top of this linguistic mountain are Hindi and Urdu. Linguists are still debating whether both systems are dialects of Hindustani, which are spoken in northern India and Pakistan. Opponents of this theory operate on the fact that the spelling of Hindi is based on the alphabet of Devanagari, while Urdu uses letters borrowed from the Persians and the Arabic alphabet.
400 million people speak Hindi, of which 140 million have learned it as a second language. It is the Hindi world that owes the words shampoo, jungle and bungalow. At present, the discussion in India on the use of Hindi as the only state language and the main language in school education does not stop.
Arabic - fourth in the world
Arabic has 267 million native speakers. Arabic is a national language in 23 states. The distribution area covers the countries of North Africa and extends to the Middle East. The total number of Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the planet in 2018 reached 350 million people. Linguists have 5 groups of dialects, but the Koran language was and remains a classic.
Arabic is the second most difficult language to learn.. The ornate ligature, more similar to the original pattern, is mesmerizing. Formed in the IV century writing is directed from right to left, while the numbers are displayed from left to right. The alphabet is also unique - it does not have vowels. For a huge number of synonyms, linguists consider Arabic speech the richest in the world. For instance, there are 1,000 definitions for a camel. The nouns “lion” and “sword” have slightly fewer analogues.
English is third in the world
English has 339 million native speakers. Third place in the ranking belongs to the language, which is official in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan, India and Malta. History returns us to the era of the invasion of Germanic tribes into the territory of the modern United Kingdom. Under the influence of the culture of the invaders in the 5th century, the formation of Old English began. The founders of the literary language were Shakespeare, Spencer, Byron and Burns.
A huge role in the spread of English was played by the aggressive wars and colonization policies pursued by Britain in the 18th century. In 2017 the total number of speakers of English exceeded 1.2 billion. The language of international communication, business, politics and tourism is studied in 95% of schools in the world, 70% of scientific publications are published on it.
Spanish - second place
Spanish has 427 million native speakers. The Spanish language is rooted in "folk" Latin - the everyday language of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, which dominates in the II – V centuries BC. in the territory of modern Spain. The language owes its popularity to the era of great geographical discoveries. In the XV – XVI centuries hundreds of ships left the harbors of the Portuguese and Castilian cities. And although the goal of sea travelers was to establish new trade routes, the most important result of the expeditions was the discovery of previously unknown lands. The language of the conquerors spread among the natives of South America, Asia and Africa.
Today, Spanish is heard in 58 countries. Apart from native speakers, 123 million people understand the most popular language of the romance group. Spanish has a melodic sound, ease of perception and study. It is characterized by simple grammar and the absence of pitfalls in structuring sentences.
The most spoken language in the world
The most widely spoken language in the world is Chinese. It has 1.302 billion native speakers.. Linguists consider it as a set of 13 dialect groups existing in the country. The most popular of them is mandarin (putonghua). Speakers of different dialects hardly understand each other. Despite this diversity, writing in all regions of the state is one. It has 40–70 thousand hieroglyphs, each of which carries its own semantic and tonal load. Not everything is simple and with words. One structural unit has 5-15 values.
Today, the Chinese language is one of the most popular and rapidly developing in the world. It is native to the people of China, Singapore and Taiwan. In total, the language of the Middle Kingdom is spoken by 1.5 billion inhabitants of the planet. Of these, 198 million are foreigners who were not stopped by the study of inconceivable hieroglyphs. Indeed, to understand 80% of the speech of ancient mandarins, you need to know at least 500 characters.
The most common languages in the world - Lahnda, Japanese, Russian, Bengali, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, English, Spanish, Chinese - speak 66% of the world's population. They all have global significance, and five (Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish and Arabic) are the official languages of the United Nations.
