Languages of the World- An opportunity to reach them.

There are approximately 6,500 living languages listed, out of these about 6,000 have registered population numbers.
Here are some interesting facts:
* 52% of the 6,000 languages are spoken by less than 10,000 people.
* 28% are spoken by less than 1,000 people.

We talk about a language and then of a dialect. The difference is not always clear-cut. It has nothing to do with similarity of vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation. Sometimes, the differences are based purely on geographical, political, or religious reasons.

The ten largest languages in the world happens to be the first languages for nearly half of the world's poulation.


The top 10 languages according to Ethnologue are:
1. Mandarin:     885 million speakers
2. Spanish:       332 million speakers
3. English:        322 million speakers
4. Bengali:       189 million speakers
5. Hindi:          182 million speakers
6. Portuguese: 170 million speakers
7. Russian:       170 million speakers
8. Japanese:    125 million speakers
9. German:        98 million speakers
10. Wu:             77 million speakers
[Wu is a language, like Mandarin, which is one of several in the Chinese branch of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family. It is the modern version of an ancient Han language spoken in southern Jiangsu Province many centuries ago. Wu was also spoken in the northern regions of Zhejiang]

Here are some other interesting facts:
* The above numbers refer to the speakers who have the language as their first language.
* If those speakers who have learnt a language as a foreign language were to be included, English may be at the top of the list.
* Arabic would be among the 10 most widely spoken languages, if it were to be counted as one language. They have ten variants of Arabic. The biggest is Egyptian Arabic with 42.5 million speakers.

Many of these languages may have changed positions based on the increase-decrease of population. However, these should give you an idea in your decision-making process while planning your foreign language translations and dubbing.