How many languages are there in the world?It is believed that from 2500 to 7000. The views of scientists on the total number of them diverge because of the lack of a unified approach to what is considered a language, and that is a dialect.
Все языки мира подразделяют на семьи, которых number 240. The largest language family and today the most studied is the Indo-European group, which includes the Russian language. The basis for including different languages in one family is a significant phonetic similarity between the roots of words denoting basic concepts and the similarity of the grammatical system.
There are also isolate languages that can not be placed in any family. An example of such a language is an isolate, a "kinship not remembering", is the dialect of the Basque "euskera."
How many languages in the modern world thatmost common? These include 10: Chinese (Mandarin), English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian, French. More than 1 billion people speak Mandarin. More than 100 million people speak each of the nine other ten most widely spoken.
The reason for the popularity of the Chinese language followsconsider that it is spoken in China, Singapore, Taiwan, the vast Chinese diaspora is in almost all countries of Southeast Asia and other countries of the world. We must not forget about the fertility of this people.
The native speakers of English and Spanish werethe most active conquerors of overseas lands, discoverers of the Americas. That is why if we look at the language map of the world, we will see that these two languages are geographically dominant. English is official in 56 countries, Spanish - in more than 20 countries. The French, as well as the British and Spaniards, also at one time created a mighty empire that controlled vast territories in North America and Africa. Today, French is the first official language in 15 countries of the world.
In the history of European civilization, severallanguages in the world at different times took the position of inter-ethnic communication - lingua franca. At the time of the Roman Empire, Koine - the common Greek language - became such a “lingua franca” for the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. Subsequently, more than 1000 years, first in the Mediterranean countries, and then throughout Catholic Europe, Latin was used as lingua franca. In the 18th-19th centuries, French became the medium of international communication. Since the end of the twentieth century, English has become the means of interethnic communication throughout the world, no doubt because of the leading position in the world of the English-speaking superpower - the United States.
In linguistics there is such a thing as “deadtongue". This is one that is no longer spoken of, and is only known about it thanks to written records. In some cases, dead languages continue to live because they are used for scientific or religious purposes. And how many languages in the world? These include Latin, from which later developed Romance languages; Old Russian, which became the basis for East Slavic languages, and ancient Greek. There are a number of dead languages that are used for scientific and religious purposes - Sanskrit, Coptic, Avesta.
There is one unique case of the resurrection of the dead.language. After the Second World War, when the state of Israel was created, Hebrew, which no one spoke of 18 centuries, was revived as the official language of this country.
In the bilingual (bilingual) environment one languageis dominant. Earlier, during the time of empires, the main reason for the dying of local languages was the mass annihilation of the local population. Today, a weaker language is dying for socio-economic reasons, and not because its carriers are dying out. Ignorance of the dominant language entails the impossibility of getting an education, moving up the social scale, etc. Therefore, in a bilingual family, parents often prefer not to even speak their own endangered language so as not to create problems for children in the future. To a large extent, the extinction process is influenced by the media using the dominant language.
The important question is how many languages inthe world. But an even more important issue is their extinction. Every 2 weeks in the world one language disappears. According to the forecasts of scientists, by the end of the XXI century they will disappear 3,5 thousand.
An interesting phenomenon in the world of languages isis an artificial talk. How many languages in the world of this type? The most famous are 16, and the most popular of them is Esperanto, created in 1887 by Ludwig Zamenhof. Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, a city where Jews, Poles, Germans, Belarusians lived. The city had a very complex inter-ethnic relations. Zamenhof considered their reason for the lack of a single language. The goal of Esperanto was to spread the ideas of peaceful coexistence among the people of the whole world. Zamenhof published an Esperanto textbook. He translated into his own language many masterpieces of world literature and even wrote poems in Esperanto. Most of the Esperanto vocabulary consists of Romance and Germanic roots, as well as Latin and Greek, having a general scientific value. About 200,000 articles in the Esperanto language have been published on Wikipedia.
Now you know how many languages there are in the world, and you can probably save the endangered by studying them.
