English is one of the most used languages in the world. There are over a billion people in the world who communicate in English as a first or second language. Moreover, most of the English content available on the internet is also written by the non-native English speaker. But, the world is also full of other languages.
According to a report, there are over 6909 living languages in the world. Each of these languages has their own interesting facts and figures which cannot be discussed in one gathering. However, in this article, I am going to tell you about a few of the interesting things about the world’s languages that you may not have known before.
The Chinese are always ahead:
Asians are always ahead. This sentence is not just a humor but there is some truth in it too. English may be the most spoken language in the world, but the Chinese Mandarin has the greatest number of native speakers. This is a lot to do with the population of the China. Nonetheless, English is far behind the numbers.
Papua New Guinea has a unique record:
The Papua New Guinea is one of the least discussed countries, mainly due to its neighbors like Australia which always remain in the hotlines. But this country holds a unique record which no other country has. With the three official languages, namely English, Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin, this country speaks overall 820 languages which are most by any individual country. The most interesting part is, this country has the population of only 8.085 million people. Way less than the combined languages spoken in the India and China, which has over 2 billion population combined.
Language is made in China too:
China is not only ahead in manufacturing tangible items, but it has created a lot of other things. China is also the home of the first recorded written form of any language. It was written in way back 4,500 BC and still preserved in the Chinese museum.
Pope can bless you in different languages if you want:
The current Pope Francis is also one of the most multilingual people in the world. Apart from all his preaching and knowledge of Catholic religion, he also can speak nine languages. To experience this on your own, just start following Pope on the Twitter and you will find that his tweets in nine different languages.
Languages that cannot be written:
In the introduction, I told you that there are over 6909 living languages in the world. But not all the languages are living in both forms of speaking and writing. Only the 54% of the proportion of these languages have a written form and rest cannot be written because of the unknown reasons. Some major reasons are that either the written form of the language get obsolete or there are very few speakers of it are left who cannot write or read.
The Multilingual South Africa:
There has been a long struggle and fight in the South Africa for the blacks and other minorities. In the end, they get what they were asking for and got as equal rights as the whites of the country. You can also find the example of it in their policy for languages. The South Africa is a country which has the most number of languages which have the official status. It has 11 languages as official including English and other languages of the small villages in the jungles of the South Africa.
A language is going to die next week:
A language dies when either its last speaker dies or it gets completely erased off from the records recorded somewhere. Due to both the reasons, in every two weeks, a language die in any part of the world. By keeping this in mind, imagine what would be the number of the languages if the time period of every death of the language would be long, imagine how many languages we would have right now.
Chinese is the oldest:
China not only has the oldest written language, but the Chinese language is the oldest written language along with Greek. The Chinese language is as old as about 1500 BC. This language is also similar to the Mandarin language, but it created way earlier than the Chinese.
Rotokas is shortest:
The Rotokas is an East Papuan Language which only has 4300 speakers. Apart from very few speakers, this language has only 12 letters in it which makes it the language with the shortest alphabets.
An Oscar Studded Language:
Not as a language, but the content created in the Italian language has this unique prestige of being a language which has most of the Oscars under its belt. The Italian, as in the foreign film category has 12 Academy Awards, which no other language has ever gotten.
Author Bio:
The Arabella Alice is a Master in Literature from the University of Birmingham and has in the business of blogging from now a decade. With his impeccable writing talent, he is also working with an academic writing company and providing custom dissertation writing services to the students in need.
