Spoken Languages
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Revision as of 02:17, 4 January 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.
