Family and Friends 6 (Reading 10)
Languages of the world
Q. How many languages are there in the world?
A. There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Some of these languages have almost disappeared and only have a few speakers left, but others are still spoken by millions of people! There are many languages which were widely spoken in the past and now no one speaks them anymore, for example, Latin or Ancient Greek.
Q. More people speak Chinese than English, so why is English the international language?
A. The reason is perhaps because English is spoken in so
many different continents. People in the UK, the US,
Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand speak
English as their first language. It's also recognized as an official language in more than 70 countries around the world!
Q. What's the most widely spoken language in the world?
A. Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world. It's the official language of China and about 900 million people living there speak it as their native language. Mandarin is also spoken in other Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. So, altogether, Mandarin is spoken by almost 15% of the world's population!
Q. What are the next most widely spoken languages in the world?
A. Hindi, English and Spanish are each spoken by over 300 million native speakers. Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, German, and French each have
100 - 300 million speakers. That's a lot of people!
Q. Why do some languages disappear?
A. International companies often have businesses in different countries. This is one reason why young people in these countries may learn the more dominant languages of the world and stop learning their own languages. Today, about 2,000 languages have less than 1,000 speakers. As time goes on, fewer and fewer people are speaking these languages and soon they may not exist anymore.
Q. How many languages will there be in the future?
A. Some scientists predict that half of the languages spoken in the world today will disappear by the end of the century, as young people stop learning the language of where they come from.