Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Most Widely-Spoken Languages

Though many languages are spoken in the world today, the most widely-spoken languages are spoken by a large percentage of the world's population. In certain cases, languages have more non-native speakers than native ones. This is the case with English.

The most widely-spoken languages in the world today are:

1)Mandarin
2)English
3)Spanish
4)Hindi
5)Arabic
6)Bengali
7)Portuguese
8)Russian
9)Japanese
10)Punjabi

Hindi is very similar to Urdu. Besides their different scripts, Hindi is spoken primarily in India and Urdu primarily in Pakistan. Bengali is a language which is spoken not only in India but also in Bangladesh. Other languages with a large number of speakers are Indonesian, a language similar to Malay which is spoken in Malaysia and Singapore, German, French, Vietnamese and Korean.

The most widely-spoken languages in the world have many speakers. Languages such as English, Spanish and Arabic are spoken in many different countries. English, the language of business and science, now has more non-native speakers than native ones.

No comments:

Featured Post

Finding the Proto-Form

Related languages have a number of words which are similar to one another. In the branch of linguistics known as historical linguistics, the...