Others are spoken by huge populations across different countries, and are often popular choices among language learners. Read on for the twelve most spoken languages in the world, in terms of native speakers , and everything you need to know about them. Language family: Germanic, a sub-family of Indo-European. With over 1, million native speakers, English is the most spoken language in the world.
Not only is Shakespeare widely considered as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, but over his lifespan he added an incredible amount of about 1, words to the English language by changing nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, connecting some words with each other and adding prefixes or suffixes to others.
In terms of native speakers alone, Mandarin Chinese is by far the second most spoken language in the world. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that the meaning of a word changes based on the way we pronounce it. With a set of about 50, characters, it is probably one of the most complex languages to learn.
Language family: Indo-Ayran, a sub-family of Indo-European. These words and many more! There are about million native Hindi speakers, which makes it the third most spoken language in the world.
Language family: Romance, a sub-family of Indo-European. Related to: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian. Fun fact: The first modern novel and the second most translated book after the Bible was written in Spanish. Which novel? With roughly million native speakers, Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world. Famed for its inscrutable grammar and quite lovely Cyrillic script, it remains one of the six languages spoken in the United Nations, and produced the literary likes of Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Pushkin.
Almost all of the million native Japanese speakers live in Japan — certainly the most highly geographically concentrated of all the languages on this list. Japanese boasts two distinct writing systems, hiragana and katakana , as well making extensive use of Chinese Kanji characters.
The largest groups of Japanese speakers living outside Japan can be found in the United States, the Philippines and Brazil.
With varying estimates of around million native speakers, the last spot on the list goes to… Lahnda, a Pakistani macrolanguage that primarily includes Western Punjabi! Sorry, German — you got dumped from top world languages a few years back. The Punjab was sliced in two by the British when they left, and millions of people were forced to abandon their homes, businesses and families. When we count the top 10 most spoken languages according to the total number of people who speak them whether or not the language is their mother tongue , eight of the 10 languages from the list above still make an appearance, but with a few major differences: English narrowly edges out Chinese for the top spot, Japanese and Punjabi lose their spots, and French and Indonesian join the top 10 thanks to the fact that more people speak them as a second language than as a native language.
Illustrations by Victoria Fernandez. This article was originally published in It has been updated with more recent data and information. Try Babbel. At this point in time, development in Lower Manhattan extended until about 14th Street , where buildings began to give way to open spaces. At the time, New York was anticipating massive growth, and the straightforward grid pattern was an efficient way to prepare the city for rapid expansion.
In the s, fire was an ever-present danger for city dwellers. In fact, a major fire tore through Lower Manhattan a year prior to when this map was published. This route is still recognizable today as the Harlem Line. One very obvious difference between the two maps is how much land has been reclaimed along shorelines in the area. Battery Park City, on the west side of downtown, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard are two prominent examples of infill. Midtown Manhattan is worth zooming into for a couple of reasons.
First, the outline of Central Park is visible, although the park would officially be approved until almost 20 years later. As well, this topographical map clearly shows the numerous outcroppings spread across the island. Manhattan was far from flat in the s, and it took a tremendous amount of effort—starting with gunpowder, pickaxes, and horse-drawn carts—to level the land. Looking at these historical maps is a reminder that the New York City we know today is the product of hundreds of years of human effort, and that cities continue to evolve over time.
There are 8 common blood groups but 36 human blood types in total. Here we map the most widespread blood types in every country in the world. But not all blood is the same. Using data sourced from Wikipedia , we can map the most widespread blood types across the globe. Of the 7. The rarest, meanwhile, is AB-, with only 0. Breaking it down to the national level, these statistics begin to change. It is also the most common blood type in Canada and the United States.
The A blood group is common in Europe. Blood provides an ideal opportunity for the study of human variation without cultural prejudice. It's by far the largest of the Austronesian languages — a family that's thought to have originated in Taiwan. The area in which Malay is spoken is extremely linguistically diverse.
Indonesia alone is home to more than living languages! Bahasa melayu , as it's known, has a long history in the region as a lingua franca , the language of government and trade.
Except Indonesians don't call it bahasa melayu Malay , they call it bahasa indonesia Indonesian. Malaysians call it bahasa malyasia Malaysian. These dialects are mutually intelligible, and shouldn't be considered separate languages. You have been warned. The largest of the Slavic languages, Russian is the official language of four countries Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It's also widely spoken in many other countries of the former Soviet Union, and has official status in numerous sub-national territories.
Russian's closest relatives include Ukrainian and Belarusian. The three are all descended from the language that was spoken in the medieval state of the Kievan Rus.
By number of native speakers, Russian is the biggest language in Europe. Like many of the Slavic languages, it's written with the Cyrillic alphabet see here for some tips on how you can learn it. Number of native speakers: million Number of non-natives: 19 million Total number of speakers: million Language family: Indo-Aryan, a sub-family of Indo-European.
Sometimes known in English by its native name Bangla , Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh and of several Indian states. In fact, it's the the second most widely spoken language in India. Like Hindustani mentioned above , Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language. This is a branch of the Indo-European family; other branches include the Romance and Germanic languages. In other words, Bengali and Hindustani are believe it or not distant cousins of English. Bengali is written in the Bengali alphabet , sometimes known as Eastern Nagari or Bengali-Assamese script.
It's related to Tibetan script. Bengali script is relatively unknown in the West, but it's actually the fifth most widely-used writing system in the world.
More people worldwide write in Bengali script than in Cyrillic! Number of native speakers: million Number of non-natives: 11 million Total number of speakers: million Language family: Romance, a sub-branch of Indo-European. Portuguese developed from Latin and is closely related to modern Spanish. Someone who speaks Portuguese is called a Lusophone.
The vast majority of Lusophones live in Brazil, which has more than twice as many Portuguese speakers than the rest of the world put together! Today, Portuguese is an official language in nine countries, as well as in the Chinese territory of Macau. Personally, I find Brazilian Portuguese to be an extremely beautiful language. That's just one of many great reasons to learn it. Number of native speakers: 76 million Number of non-natives: million Total number of speakers: million Language family: Romance, a sub-branch of Indo-European.
Rounding up the top 10 is French, another Romance language.
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