The World's 5 Top Spoken Languages

Introduction In our working group will discuss the 5 languages most spoken on the planet earth and its importance in the world.

The world 5 spoken languages The following tablepresents speaker estimates for the world's top 5 languages .The first column lists the languages on the basis of the number of mother-tongue (first-language) speakers they have. The second column gives population estimates for those countries where the language has official status. Note that the totals do not always coincide, since some major languages (such as Telugu and Javanese) are not official languages of whole countries, and some languages (such as Malay and Tagalog) are official languages of multilingual countries.  

Top 5 languages 1. Chinese (1,000) 1. English(1,400) 2. English (350) Mother-tongue speakers Official-language populations 1. Chinese (1,000) 1. English(1,400) 2. English (350) 2. Chinese (1,000) 3. Spanish (250) 3. Hindi (700) 4. Hindi (200) 4. Spanish (280) 5. Arabic (150) 5. Russian (270)

English English is a West Germanic language originating in England, and the first language for most people in Australia, Canada, the Commonwealth Caribbean, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America (also commonly known as the Anglosphere). It is used extensively as a second language and as an official language throughout the world, especially in Commonwealth countries and in many international organisations.

Asia languages The Indo-European language family is the most researched of all the families. Languages, which belong to this family, are spoken in India, Pakistan, Iran, and nearly all of Europe. The Indo-European language family has been split into smaller language groups: The Indo-Iranian has about 600 million speakers and includes languages such as Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi. These languages are spoken in northern India and in Pakistan. The ancient Indian language, Sanskrit, has had enormous impact on the historical language research. The systematic similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were observed as early as the 18th century,

Africa Languages The languages in Africa are usually divided into four language families: The Niger-Congo language family is usually divided into ten sub-groups. Each sub-group includes several hundred languages. Nearly half of the Niger-Congo languages are made up of different Bantu languages. Bantu languages are spoken by about 200 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Swahili is the most known and wide spread of the Bantu languages. The Khoisan language family is spoken by a couple of hundred thousand people in southern Africa, especially in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia and Botswana. The Khoisan language family is usually referred to as "click" languages, because of the exotic click sounds the speakers use. The Khoisan family is divided into three groups, North, Central, and South. Earlier, the family was only divided into two main groups: the Hottentots (cattle herders) and the Bushman (hunters and gatherers Ð nomads). The Afro-Asian language family is found in the northern and eastern parts of Africa from Mauritania in the west to Somalia in the east. This family is usually divided into five sub-groups. The Semitic is the most common and most understood, much thanks to the spread of Arabic, which is understood in the whole of North Africa. Arabic is understood by about 150 million people and is often the language of education. Other important Semitic languages are Amharic and Tigrinya, which are spoken by about 10 million people in Ethiopia. The long extinct Egyptian language, which is known for its hieroglyphics, is considered to have belonged to the Afro-Asian language family. The Nilo-Saharanlanguage family is all the languages that were "left over" when Africa's language families were being established. The Nilo language group includes about 150 languages, spoken by approximately 8 million people in east Africa. The Saharan language group includes 10 languages with about 5 million speakers in Chad, Niger, and Libya.

Others Languages The Romanian language group developed from Latin and has about 600 million speakers in Europe and Latin America. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian belong to this group. The Germanic language group has about 500 million speakers in Europe and North America. The Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese) belong to this group along with English, German, Dutch, Flemish (which is spoken in a part of Belgium), and Afrikaans (which is related to Dutch and is spoken in South Africa). The Slavic language group is mainly confined to Eastern Europe. It has 300 million speakers. The largest language in this group is Russian. Other Slavic languages are Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. The remaining language groups within the Indo-European language family are considerably smaller. The Baltic language group is represented by Latvian and Lithuanian. The Greek language group is made up of Modern Greek together with various older forms of Greek. The Celtic language group was once spoken all over Europe, but now it is only made up of small languages such as Breton, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic.

Working group. Work made by: Dário Medeiros, no 3 Diogo Furtado, no 4 Gonçalo Martins, no 7 João Falcão, no 10

Conclusion With this work we find that the planet earth is kind of varied languages and also learn to distinguish the difference between the first and second language.

Mandarin Mandarin (traditional Chinese: 官話; simplified Chinese: 官话; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally "speech of officials"), or Beifanghua (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally "Northern Dialect(s)"), is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin dialects have more speakers than any other language.