10 Interesting Facts among Languages

It is already one year that I started to work regularly in my blog. It is a year of research, hard work and learning. But it is a year I really enjoyed.

Here are some interesting facts that I learnt during this time, or, even knowing about them, I read a little bit more to learn from them

1.- The most spoken language in the world is Chinese. It is also the language with the most Native speakers in the world. According to  https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size  there are 1.3 billion Native speakers of Chinese.  Some theories however do not speak about a Chinese language, but about a family of languages where Mandarin is the most used. But if we agree with those theories, Mandarin is still the most spoken language in the world as native language, with almost a billion native speakers. The second most spoken language in terms of Native speakers is Spanish, with more than 400 million speakers. English is the most used in the world as L2 language. Exist different statistics about the number of speakers that do not agree in the numbers. Estimations vary from 500 million to 1 billion non native speakers.

2.- English is perhaps the “Lingua Franca” of the world. Is the main language used in the Internet, in the diplomacy, for Business, and there is almost none international organization of importance in the world that does not use it as working language. In http://www.nationsonline.org it can be read that English is used as official or main language in 83 countries / regions. It is important to note that English does not have an official status in the USA, UK and Australia, something already mentioned in this blog.

3.- The most linguistically diverse country in the world is Papua New Guinea. With a population of aprox 7.5 million hab, there are more than 820 languages spoken in this country. In http://www.nationsonline.org mentions 823 living indigenous languages, more than the whole number of languages spoken in Europe. The languages used to try at least to communicate its inhabitants with the institutions of the government are English, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu.

4.- The country that has more official languages is Bolivia. Its constitution recognises 37 official languages. However, it seems that this world record is just written in paper. In real life, the government of Bolivia uses mainly Spanish as working language, and most of the information and news spread are in this language. Other reasons that lead to dispute this number can be read in an article in Spanish appeared in http://www.la-razon.com/index.php?_url=/sociedad/guarasugwe-idiomas-oficiales-Bolivia-extintas_0_2626537323.html where mentions that 2 of the official languages, Puquina and Guarasuawe, are extinct. There are reports that estimate that there are at least 2 more extinct languages in the list. The rest of the list is composed by indigenous languages where most of them are endangered. Most of websites in English do not consider Bolivia as the Record holder of most official languages and they mention Zimbabwe, with 16 official languages. But this case has also controversies, because the government mainly uses 3 of them: English, Shona and Ndebele, and according to its own rules, all the official languages must receive equal treatment. India has 23 official languages, but most of them are used only officially at regional level, leaving only Hindi and English as official languages of the whole country.  

5.- Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language of the world. With different levels of fluency, there are aprox 2 million speakers of this language, including around 1000 native speakers, being the only constructed language where there are native speakers. It is not official language in any country or region, but some governments use it for education or information.

6.- In one of my articles, I mention that Persian is perhaps the language that has used the highest number of scripts, I saw writings in 8 scripts. However, they have been used in different circumstances, times in history and geographic zones. But if we want to learn to write and read in a language that uses more than one script at the same time, let’s try Japanese! Japanese uses simultaneously 3 systems of characters: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji (漢字) are Chinese characters that Japanese adopted to write their language. They are meaning based. Today, there are some kanjis whose meanings are not any more as in Chinese. Hiragana (ひらがな ) are characters used to represent Japanese words and grammatical elements.  Katakana (カタカナ) are characters used for words of non Chinese foreign origin. Both systems are not alphabetic but syllabic. More info can be read in https://nihongoshark.com/the-japanese-writing-system/. Very often, there is a 4^th script added as complementary and is Romanji, that is basically the use of latin script.

7.- Avestan Language is a very old Indo-European Eastern Iranian language, that has similarities with Sanskrit and Old Persian.  It is known also as the sacred language of Zoroastrians for Rituals and is the language in which Zarathustra left his teachings. But the most surprising fact about this language is that all what we know about it, is because of one book that survived until our days, and is the only written text known in this language: The Zend Avesta, The sacred text of Zoroastrianism. More can be read in www.avesta.org . We don’t know where this language was spoken and by whom, we don’t know the real name of this language and we barely have an idea of how old it is. But the Zend Avesta is long enough to show a language that can be compared word by word with Sanskrit, and to show texts in at least two different dialects.

8.- Hebrew is the only language in the world that was dead and now is a strong and living language. It is the only language that has “resurrected”. First we have to define a dead language. According to the http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ A dead language is a “language that is no longer spoken by anyone as their main language”. And that is what happened with this language that was the mother tongue of early Jewish, but since 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic. Hebrew never became extinct; it was still used for religious and literary purposes. Still some people learnt how to speak in it. It is considered that the revitalization of this language started with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his friends, who agreed to talk exclusively in Hebrew.  Ben- Yehuda worked in the creation of the establishment of the committee of the Hebrew language (ועד הלשון) that later became the academy of the Hebrew language. He wrote the first Modern Hebrew dictionary. He taught his son in Hebrew only making him the first native speaker of Hebrew in Centuries. Later, immigration of Jewish people from different parts of the world, without having a common language, and the option they had to learn and use Hebrew to intercommunicate, created this unique spark that made this language the main one used in everyday life. Today, there are more than 5 million speakers in Israel, and there are many speakers in other countries. Statistics from the office  http://www.cbs.gov.il/statistical show that around 49% of Israelis who are 20 years old or older have Hebrew as their mother tongue.

9.- We don’t know which is the oldest language spoken today. Languages like Chinese, Tamil, Basque and some others were proposed as the oldest living language. However, lack of records from earlier times, and the fact that when those languages were put to written for first time they were already spoken for a while, makes almost impossible to know when they started to exist.         

10.- Vocabulary is another characteristic of the languages. We need to know the words that we are going to use to communicate. How many words do we need to know? Answers tend to be different from one language to another. Languages do not have the same number of words. It is estimated that the language with the most extensive vocabulary is English. There are around 250,000 words in this language, although there are some sources that estimate a much more extensive vocabulary. There is another language that is influenced by English, but unlike this last, its vocabulary is so simple, that is considered the language with fewer words: Sranan,  an English based creole spoken by most people in Suriname. Some sources estimate that there are around 340 words in this language, where inflections do not exist. There are around 100,000 native speakers of this language. In 2001 appeared TokiPona, a constructed language designed by Canadian Translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa. This language has currently a vocabulary of just 123 words. Simplicity is one of the principles that were considered when this language was designed. There is much that can be said and learn just using few words.