What Are The Most Common Languages Being Spoken At The 2022 World Cup
Of the 23 total official languages represented at the World Cup, 7 of them are spoken in multiple countries. English is the most common, being listed as an official language of 9 countries competing in the World Cup. On top of being an official language, English is also a recognized language in nearly every country.
After English, French is the next most common language, followed by Spanish, Arabic, German, Dutch and Portuguese as the official languages of multiple countries in the World Cup.
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Most Spoken Languages In The World 2023
Language acts as a bridge for communication and development among the peoples of the world. In the globalized world today, there are more than 5000 languages spoken in 233 different countries and regions. Can you imagine that as some languages are slowly disappearing, some are becoming more and more commonly spoken?
So what are the most commonly used languages in the world? In this article, we will take you through the top10 most spoken languages.
- Native speakers: 360400 million
- Non-native speakers: 750 million
- Language family: Indo-European
- Official language in: 59 countries 27 non-sovereign entities Various organizations
English is the official language of the largest number of countries and the lingua franca in the world. In terms of native speakers, English is the third most spoken language after Chinese and Spanish. But its the most popular language to learn. So adding the number of non-native speakers, English is the most spoken language in the world. According to some statistics, if you know English, then you can understand 25% of internet users and 60% of the websites in the world.
- Non-native speakers: 198.7 million
- Language family: Sino-Tibetan
- Official language in: Peoples Republic of China Singapore United Nations Cooperation Organization ASEAN
Top 10 Languages By The Number Of Native Speakers
These are the most widely spoken languages in the world based solely on the number of native speakers.
The number of native speakers varies significantly Ethnologue estimates 1.3 billion native speakers, with around 1.1 billion speaking Mandarin but theres little doubt its the most commonly spoken language on the planet. This is the language to study if you want to learn a language spoken by one in every six people on the planet. Because Chinese is a tonal language with hundreds of logograms, studying it will keep you occupied for a long time.
If we solely consider native speakers, Spanish has a slight lead over English, with 471 million speakers. Spanish is the greatest language to learn if you wish to travel across continents. The politics of language and related identity are fiercely disputed, as they are for all of the languages on this list. Ask Catalan or Quechua speakers if Spanish is their native tongue, and you will receive a totally different answer. However, it is the predominant language of the vast majority of South and Central America, Spain, and, ahem, big swaths of the United States.
For example, English students learned to say I before E except after C.
When it comes to most English words, such as friend and believe, this rule stands true. There are, however, exceptions, such as science and weirdness.
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How To Define A Language
According to Ethnologue, a database for world population, a language must be two things:
- Linguistic: focused on lexical and grammatical differences, or on variations within speech communities
- Social: focused on cultural or political factors, as well as heritage and identity
There is also a set criteria for language measurements, called ISO 693-3, which ensures that languages are counted for more than just their linguistics.
Vietnamese 85 Million Native Speakers
The tenth language in our ranking is Vietnamese. This language is spoken by approximately 85 million speakers mainly in Vietnam, where it is considered national and official language. Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic.
Vietnamese has a very phonemic tone with a significant influence from Chinese and French, which include the use of tones to distinguish words with identical consonant and vowel sequences. Words order usually express syntactic relations of words to each other, while using modifiers rather than affixes can express the tense and voice of verb forms.
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Origins Of The Most Spoken Languages
The most spoken languages in the world can be split into 9 language families:
Most Widely Spoken By Number Of Countries/dependencies Where The Language Has Official Status
Compared to the list of total native speakers, this one is relatively easy to measure. Of the languages listed, Arabic provides the greatest challenge because the spoken languages that fall under the umbrella of Arabic are not all mutually intelligible. However, Standard Arabic is used as the written language in countries where dialects of Arabic are spoken.
This list shows the influence of European colonial histories on the worlds linguistic map. Languages with a large number of native speakers like Japanese and Mandarin have not travelled far beyond Asia, unlike the Western European languages that colonists spread to all corners of the world.
One challenge with compiling this list is that some countries, for example the USA, do not have an official language . In these cases, the de facto languages of the country have been counted, which naturally raises questions of its own. In other places, measuring what counts as a de facto language can be a challenge.
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French Also Has A Phrase That Contains All The Letters Of The Alphabet
English typists have The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog as a phrase to use all the letters of the alphabet. The French has an equivalent to this phrase Allez porter cevieux whisky au juge blond qui fume un havane. It means, Take this old whiskey to the blond judge who is smoking a cigar.
Languages Of The Internet
An interesting way of looking at the development of international languages is via internet usage. Internetworldstats.com aggregates information from various sources to create a list of the internets top languages by number of users.
The rankings are based on internet penetration per country and seem to assign a generous value added dollop of users to English for the many people who are assumed to speak English as a second language and use it for browsing the web.
But this doesnt quite illustrate how central English is to the web. Google tracks the percentage of links going to and from websites in various languages. Unsurprisingly, many more links are pointed at English-language sites from other languages than the other way around.
A more informal way of measuring the languages of the internet would be to look at the number of articles in each language on Wikipedia:
English
If you combine the number of books published in the USA, UK and the nearly 25% of books in India which are published in English, English remains the number one language of international publishing.
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What Is The Most Spoken Language In The World 2022 Top 10 Spoken Languages Globally
Language forms the backbone of communal existence. If youve ever traveled to a place where you dont speak the language, it doesnt take long to discover this.
Where is the nearest bathroom? How much does this cost? From the most rudimentary questions of human survival to complex religious and philosophical texts, language is one of the greatest tools society can offer for us to communicate with one another and understand the world around us.
Countless dialects exist across the globe, some closely related to one another and others completely foreign. Find out which language is the most commonly spoken, and which new one might be easiest for you to learn.
French Is The Language Of Fashion
The French language has a long history of being used in the fashion industry, with many of the leading fashion designers and labels based in France.
French is also the language of choice for many fashion magazines and websites, and there are many French words and phrases which have become part of the fashion worlds lexicon, such as haute couture and démodé. The influence of French in the fashion world is also reflected in the fact that French is the official language of the fashion capital of the world, Paris.
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Not Out Of The Woods Yet
By some estimates, 30% of the globes carbon emissions are absorbed by forests each year. In order to keep our global average temperatures at 1.5°C, action needs to ramp up to diminish deforestation. One solution is to open up funding and participation to the private sector and bridge their efforts with that of the public sector.
Swift action is required in order to slow deforestation and decelerate rising average temperatures. See how The LEAF Coalition, a public-private initiative is accelerating climate action by providing results-based finance to countries committed to protecting tropical forests.
Iranian Persian 774 Million Speakers
The Persian language is a group of related languages that are spoken either in Iran or by Iranian people all over the world. The most widely spoken dialects of this language include Western and Eastern varieties, with other closely related languages like Kurdish, Pashto, Ossetic and Tati.
The earliest written form of Persian appeared during the Sassanid Era . However, its usage declined during the Islamic era until it became popular again between 1925-1935 under Reza Shahs dynasty. Reza Shah made Farsi a required school subject for all children in Iran.
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What Is The Most Spoken Language In The World
Online language tool Babbel reports that English is the most spoken language in the world, with a number of speakers totaling more than 1.4 billion in 2022, according to Statistic & Data. This combines both native and non-native speakers.
If you shift the definition strictly to native speakers, Babbel reports that Chinese a designation including Mandarin along with a number of other dialects is the winning language, with 1.3 billion native speakers. Mandarin itself is the second most spoken language in the world.
English 1121 Million Speakers
It is the most widely spoken language in the world because of the global impact of England and the United States in the last three centuries.
It is not the mother tongue of most people, but it is the one that most people seek to learn. With English, there is no country or culture that cannot be accessed in a globalized world. This is the lingua franca of the 21st century.
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The Most Spoken Languages In The World And Where They Are Spoken
Our world is becoming more and more globalized by the day, and as a result, many of us are being introduced to a variety of some of the most spoken languages in the world. With a plethora of countries, cultures, and ethnicities that all have their own unique languages, its not surprising that there are more than 7,000 widely spoken languages in the world!
If youre reading this article, you probably have a decent understanding of one of the most popular languages on earth, English. And although English is currently the worlds most spoken language , its not the only one that matters.
As you explore the languages in this article, youll discover that there are many more international languages that might matter more than English in the near future. As a vital part of human connections, language allows us to share our thoughts, ideas, and feelings with the rest of the world.
Read on to find out which languages fill out the 20 most spoken languages in the world and discover some fun and fascinating facts about each of them!
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Thai 607 Million Speakers
Thai is one of the most studied languages in Southeast Asia. The earliest written form of Thai appeared in 1292 CE during the Ayutthaya era.
Thai can be a little difficult for English speakers to learn. This is because Thai has many sounds that dont exist in our language such as consonants pronounced with a throaty sound or vowels opened almost like a whistle. Some are similar sounding while others are more difficult to distinguish at first glance.
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The Most Spoken Languages 1900/2022
Lets start by trying to answer a first question. What are the most spoken languages in 2022? In 2022, the most spoken language in the world will be English. Mostly spoken in Great Britain and the United States as a first language, but also in many other countries as a first or second language, English will exceed 1.4 billion people speaking it in 2022. In second position we have Mandarin Chinese with over 1.119 billion people speaking it. And in third place is Hindi, which is expected to be spoken by more than 653 million people in 2022.
The first most spoken languages in the world in 2022 are the same as in 2021. But between 2021 and 2022, some figures changed. Bengali overtook Modern Arabic to rank sixth in 2022. Bengali is spoken by more than 272 million people worldwide as a first and second language. Portuguese has also overtaken Russian, with more than 263 million speakers in 2022. Spanish, which is spoken by more than 500 million people worldwide, also ranks high. In fifth place is French, with 282 million speakers.
What About Second Languages
Nearly 43% of the worlds population is bilingual, with the ability to switch between two languages with ease.
From the data, second language speakers can be calculated by looking at the difference between native and total speakers, as a proportion of the total. For example, 66% of English speakers learned it as a second language.
Swahili surprisingly has the highest ratio of L2 speakers to total speakersalthough it only has 16 million native speakers, this shoots up to 98 million total speakers. Overall, 82% of Swahili speakers know it as a second language.
Swahili is listed as a national or official language in several African countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its likely that the movement of people from rural areas into big cities in search of better economic opportunities, is whats boosting the adoption of Swahili as a second language.
Indonesian is another similar example. With a 78% proportion of L2 speakers compared to total speakers, this variation on the Malay language has been used as the lingua franca across the islands for a long time. In contrast, only 17% of Mandarin speakers know it as a second language, perhaps because it is one of the most challenging languages to learn.
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A Complete Guide To The Languages At The 2022 World Cup
Editor
Berlitz China
When the World Cup kicks off in just a few short weeks, it will be the 22nd running of the competition. As one of the premier sporting events in the world, it is truly a global event that brings together cultures from all over the world.
As a melting pot of cultures, one of the most interesting aspects of the World Cup each year is language. This year, there will be 23 different official languages represented and how those languages are used on the field, in the stands and outside the stadiums is always fascinating.
To help get you prepared for this yearâs World Cup, weâve put together a definitive list of all the different languages and cultures that will be present this year.
The French Keyboard Has A Unique Layout
Most French writers located in Europe use the AZERTY keyboard, with has a different layout than the QWERTY keyboard that is widely used by English writers. But what makes the French Azerty keyboard unique is the addition of the grave-accented letter ù key. However, there is only one French word that uses this letter the word où that means where.
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Japanese 150 Million Speakers
Although Japan is only 377,975 kilometers long, it has 126 million inhabitants. But to speak rigorously of the language, we must include other corners of the world such as Palau, Marshall Islands, Guam, Hawaii, Micronesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and some more
If with Portuguese we said that the language opens the doors to another planet, with Japanese we would have to speak of another universe.
It is about another culture that does not even have to do with the western one. The differences are so great that sometimes there are no common places between Japan and the rest of the world. And all that is the most interesting and attractive thing about learning Japanese.