
īubble chart of languages by proportion of native speakers worldwide Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be under-reported in favour of a national language.


In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language. While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors describe its mutually unintelligible varieties as separate languages. Ĭonversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian and even English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible. įor example, a language is often defined as a set of varieties that are mutually intelligible, but independent national standard languages may be considered to be separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian. However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers. Korean forms are used for the number of items from 1 to 60 and age.Current distribution of human language families So books, people, trees, and any number of objects also use the Korean numbers. However, most objects are counted using the Korean system unless the counting involves money.


So, for example, the word 10 might be spoken using two entirely different words depending on what’s being counted.
