On Earth, there are about 7,000 languages [1] .
With the development of communications, the number of living languages decreases with an average speed of 1 language in two weeks [2] .
The 40 most common languages are spoken by approximately 2/3 of the world 's population. Most people speak Chinese , Hindi , English , Spanish , Arabic , Russian and Portuguese . The French language is also very widespread, but the number of those who consider it native (first) is relatively small.
Currently, there are just over 400 languages that are considered endangered.
Languages die with the last native speaker, and therefore the danger is, first of all, to nations that do not use writing [3] .
One of the reasons for the death of languages is their uneven distribution according to the number of speakers. So, 80 languages are accounted for 80% of the world's population, and only 0.2% of the world's inhabitants account for 3.5 thousand languages. The main causes of the process of the disappearance of languages are globalization and migration. People leave villages to cities and lose the language of their people [4] .
About half of the existing languages will become obsolete by the middle of the 21st century [5] . Many languages disappear due to the fact that their speakers come into contact with a stronger language environment, therefore, the languages of small nationalities and the languages of peoples without statehood are primarily at risk of extinction. If less than 70% of children learn a language, it is considered endangered. According to the Atlas of World Languages Endangered by UNESCO , about 50 languages are currently threatened with extinction in Europe .
The most vulnerable are the languages of the natives of Australia, Indochina, America, Africa and islands isolated from the continents - there are many small nationalities that are crowded out by others, and also, in the case of the islands, there is no one to revive it with the mass death of the people. The languages of Europe are most resistant - the countries of Europe are developed, and many inhabitants live in them; therefore, the loss of even several thousand native speakers of these languages is insignificant. The only exception is Latin , which is one of the official languages of the Vatican and is already a dead language.
Content
Language Systematics
The family is the basic level on which all linguistic systematics are based. A family is a group definitely, but far enough related languages that have at least 15% matches in the base list (the verbose version of the Swadesh list ). For an example, see a list of Eurasian families or an overview of African families .
For each family, the list of branches, groups, etc., is determined taking into account the traditionally distinguished groupings, the degree of their closeness to each other, and the time of disintegration into components. At the same time, branches and groups of different families do not have to be of the same level of depth, only their relative order within the same family is important.
For example, for the Indo-European family , the following set of branches can be distinguished: Anatolian , Tochar , Celtic , Balto-Slavic , Indo-Iranian , Germanic , Italian - Romance , Greek-Macedonian , Armenian , Albanian and a number of ancient languages, conditionally united in the Paleobalkan zone .
Bilingualism
The number of people speaking two or more languages is constantly increasing. For example, according to a recent study, a significant part (in one of the states - more than half) of Indian students speak English better than their native ones .
Most Common Language Families
- Indo-European languages ~ 2.5 billion native speakers, including Romance , Indo-Aryan , Germanic and Baltic-Slavic ;
- Sino-Tibetan languages ~ 1.2 billion native speakers, including primary Chinese ;
- Ural-Altai languages (education of the superfamily level) ~ 500 million speakers, including the main Turkic languages .
World Languages
Modern international languages can be considered [6] (in descending order of the total number of speakers):
| Rank | Tongue | Native | Second | Total number of media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| one | Chinese language [8] | 1.2 billion | up to 300 million | up to 1.5 billion |
| 2 | English language [6] | 500 million | up to 1 billion | up to 1.5 billion |
| 3 | Spanish language [9] | 425 million | up to 125 million | up to 550 million |
| four | Arabic language [10] | 300 million | up to 120 million | up to 420 million |
| five | Russian language | 170 million | up to 130 million | up to 300 million |
| 6 | Portuguese language [11] | 230 million | up to 30 million | up to 260 million |
| 7 | German language [12] | 120 million | up to 80 million | up to 200 million |
| eight | French language [13] | 75 million | up to 195 million | up to 270 million |
International Languages Map
Maps showing the spread of international languages:
French
Spanish language
Russian language
Arabic
Portuguese
German
English
Chinese
UN Official Languages
English , Arabic , Chinese , Russian , Spanish , and French are the official languages of the UN [14] .
See also
- Language taxonomy
- Genetic classification of languages
Notes
- ↑ Ethnologue - the world's largest catalog of languages (English)
- ↑ Almost half of the world's languages face extinction
- ↑ When tongues die
- ↑ The world is losing tongues
- ↑ Roman Fishman Linguistic Homunculus // Popular Mechanics . - 2017. - No. 5. - S. 78-82. - URL: http://www.popmech.ru/magazine/2017/175-issue/
- ↑ 1 2 The triumph of English: A world empire by other means | The economist
- ↑ Summary by language size
- ↑ China - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- ↑ El español será la segunda lengua de comunicación internacional
- ↑ L'arabe
- ↑ Ethnologue report for language code
- ↑ Ethnologue: Statistical Summaries
- ↑ La francophonie
- ↑ UN Official Languages
Links
- Ivanov V.V. Languages of the world // Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary / Editor-in-chief V. N. Yartseva . - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia , 1990 .-- 685 p. - ISBN 5-85270-031-2 .