Home

Translations

Languages

Hobbies

Links

Sitemap

Legal Info

Download

It is very difficult to define how many languages are spoken worldwide, because it is rather complicated to distinguish between what is a language and what is a dialect.

However, it is estimated that more than 10.000 languages are spoken all over the world. There are already more than 120 different languages on the small continent of Europe alone.

The most spoken languages all over the world are:

• Chinese spoken by approx. 1,1 billion people

• English, spoken by approx. 1,7 billion people, but included are countries that have installed English as their second official state language.

• Spanish, spoken by approx. 372 billion people

• German with approx. 145 million speakers ranks in the eleventh place.

• French, spoken by approx.124 million people

Of course, these figures, as known at present, are continuously changing upwards and they certainly have to be up-dated from time to time.

English

Chinese

Russian

French

Arabic

Spanish

English is the language with the most spreading worldwide  and is language of  international communication as well. It belongs to the largest language family, the  Indo-European.

Wherever you are, there are good chances to find an English speaker. 

It is a so called sound language.  Words that are identical may have very different meanings depending on the respective pitches and their stretch in a word. 

Mandarin is the most spoken individual language worldwide.  Out of the sphere of the Chinese language you will find only a few people who master one of the different variants of Chinese.

In Russia Russian is  the only official language. This status is shared with White Russian, Casachian, and Ukrainian in White Russia..  

Russian is written in Cyrillic letters which derive from the Greek alphabet. The 24th May is the day of the Cyrillic letters in Russia. 

With the end of the Soviet Union the Russian language has lost its influence. Today it is no longer a compulsory foreign language of most of the school children in the former states of the Warsaw Pact.

In former times French was  the language of the European nobility and later also that of diplomacy.  Nowadays, there are still regions in the world where you can get along better with French than with English. 

Arabic is official language on the Arabic Peninsula, in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordania, the Mediterranean neighbor states of North Africa as well as in Mauritania and Somalia. 

The individual Arabic dialects differ from each other in such considerable manner that the verbal communication is very often difficult. However,  everybody uses the generally well understandable High Arabic for the written language. 

Religious Muslims recite the Koran in the Arabic original though, but out of North Africa and Arabia you will meet relatively few people who speak and understand Arabic. 

The language was very strongly influenced by the fact that the Arabic was present in Spain for more than 700 years.  More than 1000 Spanish words originate from the Arabic language. 

Parallel to the economical development of Latin America Spanish is becoming more and more important.  And there is another advantage: Spanish is said to be a language which can be learned rather easily.