To many people it may seem that English is the most widely spoken language in the world, this is sort of true to the extent that it is the most popular secondary language, it is after all the official language of the Business World as well as the language used in international relations. There are many languages out there which are more widely spoken than English and in this article I am going to discuss a few of them.
What Are the Most Spoken Languages in the World? The answer to this question is a rather complex one. The problem is that there are many dialects of various languages; in fact European Spanish is totally different to South American Spanish although this quite often comes under the heading of being the same language as they are able to understand each other. Further confusion also arises as the statistics that researchers have come out with varies wildly from study to study. For example in many studies the ‘Hindi’ Language is one of the most spoken languages in the world, but in some studies it is ranked as 5th or 6th. The most widely accepted accurate list comes from SIL Ethnologue which contains statistics of all the languages of the world. This is the list they have for the top 10 most widely spoken languages:
Each of these languages have over one hundred million native speakers. For some reason only one of these languages is widely taught in English Schools, this language being Spanish, although the reasons for this is out of the scope of this article. Many of these languages are so widely spoken due to the European Settlement of the Americas, which is where the majority of Spanish and Portuguese Speakers can be found. Interestingly the most popular language; Mandarin is only widely spoken in one country in the world, that of course being China, this due to the huge area of the country as well as high population. If I was going to learn a Language from this list then I would choose Spanish as it is spoken in numerous places in the world and it’s also an incredibly beautiful language.
Internet is a huge place, although we tend to only find websites that are written in English. However there is a wealth of information out there that is not written in the language that we speak. In the past we would have had to either hire a translator which is expensive or just give the information a skip. However, in the era of internet there is a wealth of translation tools that we have at our disposal and we can covert a document into our own language, which of course has made information sharing much more global. The only problem is that many of these translation machines are not always accurate due to differing grammatical structures, but there are plenty of places we can turn to for translation help including Internet Forums and Yahoo Answers.
English may be the language for communicating on the internet for the most popular websites, although it should be remembered that internet is incredibly global. Translation Tools nowadays make the process of learning a language simple, in fact many of them will also tell you how the word is meant to sound. They also enable us to communicate with people who do not have English as their primary language, although they are of course no substitute for learning a new language.
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