Southern China (especially Guangdong province), Hong Kong and Macau Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world – it is spoken by at least 50% of China’s 1.3bn population. Like its name suggests, this family groups the languages of China and Tibet. But it is used as a lingua franca for most of East Africa and second language speakers swell the ranks to a massive 80 million! Swahili has between 5 and 10 million native speakers who mainly live in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. Most African languages belong to this group, which may be the largest in the world in terms of distinct languages. Hausa is the native language of inhabitants of Niger and Northern Nigeria, but it is also used as lingua franca in many countries of West and Central Africa. It is a main language in the following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, UAE, Western Sahara, Yemen These languages are spoken in North Africa and include the Berber languages spoken by desert nomads of the Sahara.Īrabic in various dialects is spoken throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Mostly in Hungary, although parts of Austria and the Balkans have Hungarian speakers. As in Mandarin, the literal translation of this greeting is ‘how are you?’ The rest are divided between Xinxiang province in China, Uzbekistan, Russia, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Tajikistan.
Mongolian speakers also live in some parts of Russia, China (Inner Mongolia) and Kyrgyzstan.Īlmost 7 million of the world’s 10 million Kazakh speakers live in Kazakhstan. Also the languages spoken in Azerbeijan and parts of Iran, Georgia and the Balkans are very similar to Turkish. The greetings above are used in the morning, around midday and in the evening respectively. Japanese is spoken pretty much only in Japan. Likewise, there is some disagreement on whether Turkish and Korean belong to this group as well.ĩ.
We included it here in the Ural-Altaic family, but some linguists think it belongs better in the Austronesian family whilst others think it canot be classified. Experts do not agree on which language family Japanese belongs to. Kazakhstan in particular has large numbers of ethnic Russians who speak Russian rather than Kazakh.Ī controversial language family. Russia, and as a first or second language in the Eastern European, Caucasian and Central Asian countries of the former USSR. That’s the local name for Persian as it is spoken in Iran. Some people classify Hindi as the same language as Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan. Hindi is one of the official languages of India, but is spoken as native language by only 41% of the population. Also spoken in former Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Macau. It is also the second most common language in the USA, spoken by more than 34m Hispanic Americans. Outside Spain, Spanish, or Castillian as it is sometimes called, is the main language of all Central and South American countries apart from Brazil. This diverse and widespread language group includes most European languages as well as some from further East.Īpart from France, Belgium and Switzerland this will also be understood in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria and the sub-Saharan African countries of DR Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Guinea, Gabon and Mauritius. Obviously the main drawback of this list is that it only has 20 languages, so if yours isn’t there please tell us about it in the comments! They are grouped according to their language families.
Vanakkam meaning in korean plus#
The languages were chosen based on those known by PocketCultures and our friends, plus some others that came into our heads. Of course it takes a lot of of practice to get to that level but learning to say ‘Hello’ is a good start. On a recent trip to the beautiful Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey I was impressed to see the stall owners switch effortlessly from one language to another as they greeted customers from different countries.