Showing posts with label Languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Languages. Show all posts

Jun 2, 2017

Languages

According to Ethnologue, there are over 7,000 distinct languages in the world and about 40,000 dialects. Some languages, like Russian and Hindi, are written from left-to-right, while others, like Hebrew and Persian, are written right-to-left.
The nation of Papua New Guinea has the highest language diversity in the world. There are 820 languages spoken in an area the size of Spain.

There are logographic languages, like Japanese and Korean, where symbols represent words, and there are Dongba and Nsibidi which are pictographic languages where symbols represent ideas.

Incidentally, there are over 1.5 billion speakers of English globally. In 2015, out of the total 195 countries in the world, 67 nations have English as the primary language of 'official status'. Plus there are 27 countries where English is spoken as a secondary 'official' language.