There are 196 countries and, according to Ethnologue,
7,117 languages are spoken around the world.
Each and every one of them make the world a diverse and beautiful place. Of these languages, 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Language is how we exchange knowledge and experiences through the use of acoustic as well as kinesic signals. Languages carry inside them: the poetry, literature, jokes, proverbs and turns of phrase.
More than race or religion, language is a window on to the deepest levels of human diversity. Dialect is a form of language which is regionalized. Each dialect is a collection of idiolects that are similar enough to be classified together. However, those dialects may be so different that they cannot be understood if a person is from from another region.
Particularly dominant are just a few dozen languages of wider communication, less politely called “killer languages”. English, Spanish and Chinese are on the march, but so are Nepali and Brazilian Portuguese.
Languages of note:
- Mandarin: Spoken by over a billion people is an extremely difficult for people when their native languages use the Latin writing system.
- Tamil: oldest language in the world and the oldest language of the Dravidian family. This language had a presence around 5,000 years ago.
- Sanskrit: ‘the mother of all languages,’ the dominant classical language of the Indian subcontinent and one of 22 official languages of India. Also the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
- Busuu – a language spoken by only eight people.
Many of the living languages are endangered or on the verge of extinction. Roughly half of the world’s languages are moribund – new generations are not being raised to speak them. Within a century, the number of living languages may well be fewer than 1,000.
Most recently
In this century alone, 12 languages have been classified as dead. The most recent being the Klallam language. In February 2014, Hazel Sampson, its last native speaker, passed away. Klallam was the traditional language of the Klallam natives living on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, located on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state and Vancouver Island’s Beecher Bay in British Columbia.
Syntactic typology distinguishes languages based on their preferred word order. The most commonly considered phrases considered are the subject, object, and verb. The theory is that the verb serves as the head of a verb phrase containing it and the object, and the subject combines with this phrase to create a sentence