ABOUT LANGUAGES IN THE WORLD

LANGUAGES:  We need and enjoy using one or more languages every day. In my own case my first language was Cimbrian - the dialect spoken in my home region in the North of Denmark. It was only when I started in school I learned my first "foreign language", Danish.  It wasn't that difficult.  I knew it from the radio...     Later on more languages have been added. One of them was Russian. I had to study it at my university, because I in my main study in political science was dealing with Soviet-Finnish Relations 1944-68.  So I had to be able to read what the Russians were up to - also in their own language.  Later on I have unfortunately almost forgotten it.  But it is one of the nicest languages I know of!

There are about 6.500 different languages in the world. 23 of them are spoken by half of the population of the world. The biggest language in the world in Mandarin.  About 2.000 of the languages are each spoken by less than 1.000 people. Many languages are about to disappear and be forgotten. During the last one hundred years about 600 languages have disappeared.  The United Nations made the year 2019 the International Year on Indigenous Languages. All in all 370 small groups of people around the world speak these indigenous languages. They are often limited to a small geographical area.

Try to find - and also to listen to - many languages around the world on this interactive map:
www.localingual.com  

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