World languages

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Last Updated: Wednesday, 03 April 2024 01:21
Published: Thursday, 21 July 2022 05:44
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World languages:

I've added this section to explore different languages in world, and how to learn them.

These are the 10 most spoken languages: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-10-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world
 

  1. English: There are only 0.4B native speaking people, but it's spoken and understood by about 1.5B people worldwide. If you are on this website, you already know English. This is the most spoken and used language, so some form of English is a must to survive anywhere.
  2. Chinese: Spoken by 1.3B people, it's the most spoken language after English. But it's also the hardest language to learn. It is the most spoken native language. It has 10 variants but most of them are just dialects with some differences. Of the 10, bottom 2 are spoken by < 1% of the population, so they are often dropped from the list. We'll look at the top 8 variants which are the more popular:
    1. Mandarin: This is the official Chinese language that is used by 2/3rd of the country. This is the one that people learn, when they say the are learning Chinese.
    2. Cantonese (Yue): This is the second most internationally popular variant of Chinese language, even though it's spoken by only 5% of the Chinese people. The reason is probably due to it's use in movies and in regions outside of mainland China as  HongKong and Macau,  It sounds quite different from Mandarin Chinese and the two are mutually unintelligible.
    3. Hakka (Kejia): This is the third most well-known Chinese variety abroad, probably due to the fact that Hakka is commonly spoken in many overseas Chinese communities. It's spoken by only 3.5% of Chinese though. Gan is another Chinese dialect that is spoken by 3.9% of the population and is considered to be closely related to Hakka.
    4. Misc (Min, Wu, Jin, Xiang): These are other popular Chinese dialects, Min and Wu are spoken by approx 6%, Jin by about 5% and Xiang by about 3% of Chinese population. Wu is mostly spoken around Sanghai, so it's also referred to as Sanghainese.
  3. Spanish: Spanish has 0.5B native speaking people. It's spoken in a lot of central America and South American countries. It's also spoken in southern states of USA as a lot of hispanic population lives in USA. It's certainly one of the most useful languages to learn, if you are in USA.
  4. Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Urdu: Hindi has 0.6B speakers, while Bengali, Urdu and Arabic each have about 0.25B speakers. I've clubbed all these languages into one, as they are linked to each other.
  5. French: Even though everyone wants to learn French, it's spoken by only 0.25B people. Nonetheless, it's in top 10 spoken languages of the world.
  6. Russian: Just as Chinese language is only spoken in China, Russian is only spoken in Russia , and has very limited use. It's in top 10, just because of the large population of USSR.
  7. Portugese: You wouldn't expect to see Portugese in top 10 languages, but the reason it's here is because it's spoken in Brazil. Portugal did rule over the world, along with Spain couple of centuries back. But they were beaten by Spain everywhere, so they colonized very few places. Brazil and Portugal are the 2 countries where Portugese is spoken exclusively.