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There are 6800 known languages spoken in the 200 countries of our beautiful world, and Babel Linguistics works with (quite) a few of them. Here is a list of the languages that we work with, followed by a brief (and liberal) linguistic introduction of their families (and subfamilies). German, English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian, Greek, Polish, Czech, Albanian, Armenian, Latvian,
Lithuanian, Irish, Gaelic, Hindi (Punjabi), Persian (Urdu and
Farsi), and Bengali The so-called Slavic, Germanic, Hellenic, Romance, Celtic and Baltic languages. This family includes most of the major languages of Europe, South Asia, and Southwest Asia, and it has the largest amount of native speakers in the world (around three billion). Evidence of these languages dates to the early 2nd millennium BC, although even at that time they were already diversified and widely distributed. There is recent strong evidence that the Indo-European language group originated in Anatolia – Asia Minor – a peninsula of Western Asia that forms the greater part of the Asian portion of Turkey. “Indo” refers to the Indian sub-continent. Italian, Spanish, Catalan, French, and Portuguese This family’s mother is Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The earliest evidence for the ancestor of Latin comes from the 7th century BC. Over 700 million native speakers use these languages, mostly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. These languages are beautifully musical probably because of the relatively greater importance of vowels over consonants. Spanish is the most spoken Romance language and possibly the second most spoken language by number of native speakers. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 500 million. The name castellano or Castilian – a term from Spain – is however widely used for the language as a whole in Latin America. Often Latin Americans use it to differentiate their own variety of (standard) Spanish as opposed to the variety of Spanish spoken in Spain. The real main difference between both, regardless of phonetics, is that standard or neutral Spanish uses “ustedes” instead of “vosotros” (used by Castilian Spanish), both of which are 2nd person plural pronouns as in you (you all). Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean This name comes from the Latin auster (south wind) and Greek nêsos (island). Spoken by millions of islanders of Southeast Asia and the Pacific and a few groups in continental Asia. According to historical linguistics, Taiwan is the home of these very ancient languages. Vietnamese, Cambodian A large language family of Southeast Asia. Also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. Other than in Vietnam and Cambodia, the rest of the languages from this family are spoken by minority groups. Mongolian, Turkish Sixty-six languages spoken by about 348 million people in areas of Central Asia and Northeast Asia. Altaic refers to wilderness or uninhabited places. Arabic, Hebrew, Somali, Egyptian These are the languages of Africa and Southwest Asia (about 375 languages and over 300 million speakers), including around 200 million speakers of Arabic. Many of these languages are tonal (they use tone to distinguish meanings) and a lot of specific vocabulary from this family is still unknown or missing. The dates of pottery and agriculture sets approximate early and late dates for this linguistic dispersal. Thai 60 tonal and analytic languages with about 50 million speakers. They seem to have originated in what is now southern China. Mandarin | Cantonese Chinese About 250 languages of East Asia, which probably originated in the Himalayan plateau, the source of great rivers. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in number of speakers. Many of them are separate languages or dialects of one language, and some are even “languages” that have yet to be discovered. Hungarian, Bulgarian, Russian, Finnish,
Estonian, Ukrainian, Moldovan (Romanian), Serbiocroatian, Slovakian,
Slovene, Bosnian, Macedonian About 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. The name of this family refers to the suggested homeland of these languages, which is close to the Ural mountains, and their structure is rather uncommon. They make extensive use of independent suffixes. They have negative verbs but no specific verb for “have”, and they lack contrastive tone, grammatical gender, and possessive pronouns and prepositions (the latter are rare). They also have a large set of grammatical cases (codes in the morphology of nouns). Swahili Spoken by a minority and unique to the region of sub-Saharan Africa (Niger-Congo) and Kurdufan (an area of Sudan). Ethnically, these speakers (about two million) inhabit the Nuba Mountains. There are around forty odd languages in this region. The name 'Kordofan' probably comes from the Nubian word kurta meaning man. Swahili is the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa. However, as lingua franca (vehicular language) it is used by about 80 million speakers.
Additional Facts: Babel Linguistics works consistently with the 10 most common
first languages, listed as follows by number of speakers:
Mandarin Chinese, 885 million Spanish, 332 million
English, 322 million
Arabic, 220 million
Bengali, 189 million
Hindi, 182 million
Portuguese, 170 million
Russian, 170 million
Japanese, 125 million
German, 98 million
Make Languages, Not War: Alarming Facts
80% of the 260 native languages still spoken in the United States and Canada aren’t being learned by children. One reason for language loss.
Eyak, native to the coast of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, has lost its last speaker. Marie Smith Jones died in Jan. 2008 at the age of 89.
South America: Hundreds of languages died as a result of the Spanish conquest. About 80% of the continent’s remaining 640 languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people each; 27 face extinction.
Many languages from the Amazon region have fewer than 500 speakers, including Arikapu, which has 6.
Africa: In the birthplace of nearly one-third of the world’s languages, 54 are believed dead, with another 116 nearing extinction.
Asia: More than half of Asia’s native languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers each, although 3 billion, or half the world’s population, live on this continent.
Australia: About 90% of its 250 aboriginal languages face extinction.
Europe: Nearly 90% of Russians speak Russian, the language enforced during the Soviet era. Consequently, most of the country’s 100 other native languages, nearly all of them Siberian tongues, are near extinction, including Udihe.
Source of Facts: Worldwatch Institute
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