Spoken Languages

Revision as of 13:57, 26 February 2013

Spoken language is believed to date back 50,000 to 100,000 years, and is considered to be one of the major things that distinguish humans from animals. It long predates Written Languages.

The languages with the largest number of native speakers are:

• Mandarin
• Spanish
• English
• Arabic languages
• Hindi
• Bengali
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Japanese
• German

A major issue is that languages are collapsing as worldwide networking increases - the larger languages outstrip the smaller communities, and entire sets of languages are lost. A number of projects are underway to catalog these dying or disappearing languages.

Artificially constructed languages

In addition to the languages which have evolved naturally among humans, some languages have been artificially constructed, sometimes as part of fictional universes and other times intended for actual use in communication.

"Serious" artificial languages

• Esperanto
• Interlingua
• Ithkuil
• Loglan
• Volapük

"Fictional" artificial languages

• Elvish (Tolkien)
• Klingon (Star Trek)
• Láadan (Native Tongue)
• Pakuni (Land of the Lost)
• Simlish (The Sims)

References

• Language: Wikipedia
• The Google Endangered Languages Project
• The Open Language Archives
• Songs in endangered languages
• Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.
• How to Save a Dying Language
• Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program (BBC, 2013-02-12).