No wonder English is still one of India’s national languages. (Along with Hindi.) India has a population of 1.438 billion, just surpassing China.
Wendy
5 Likes
Yes, and with the official visit of a certain Liberian president, I was curious about how many languages there are there:
Languages
English is the official language and serves as the lingua franca of Liberia.(Liberia - Wikipedia) 27 indigenous languages are spoken in Liberia, but each is a first language for only a small percentage of the population. (Liberia - Wikipedia) Liberians also speak a variety of creolized dialects collectively known as Liberian English.(Liberia - Wikipedia)
The native Niger–Congo languages can be grouped in four language families: Mande, Kru, Mel, and the divergent language Grebo.(Liberia - Wikipedia)(Liberia - Wikipedia) Kpelle-speaking people are the largest single linguistic group.
And then there is Papua New Guinea:
- Papua New Guinea is the world’s most multilingual country, with a total of 840 languages spoken.
Pete
4 Likes
When it came to planting the flag around the world I think England won, with Spain a close second.
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Really quite an amazing place … big mountain range down the middle with sharply divided canyons create significant barriers to movement so that two or three small nearby villages may constitute all the speakers of a particular language. Historically, they might go on a raid to a neighboring group, possibly steal a woman or two, but no real commerce since everyone had the same stuff.
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Urdu is Hindi written right to left. Yep just like Hebrew and Arabic. Hindi is left to right. Most of the words are the same in both languages.
Fun story, I work with a Tamil gentleman who loves Urdu and hates Hindi. He says everyone in Hindi only curses.
I asked him about translating my game into Hindi and Urdu. He said most people speak Urdu because it is a clean language. In fact over 600 million people speak Hindi and about 200 million speak Urdu. I will translate the game into both languages.
The software has a spreadsheet of sorts for the two dozen words in the game. I translate and fill in the words. I will translate the game into 14 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Malaysian, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Russia was second, Spain was third.
Russia and GB were each 1/6 of the landmass of the globe.
Remember the US had already dropped out of the count for GB.
Number of Indians and/ or people with Indian ethnicity in the world will be much higher in next 100 - 200 years compared with any other ethnicity. This population outside India also tends to be high earners and more influential in society (CEOs, Politics, Doctors, High Tech etc.).
I wonder how many tribal languages survive in the U.S. Even Mexico has some. Not just Spanish.
I wonder how many tribal languages survive in the U.S. Even Mexico has some. Not just Spanish.
When the nursing home had burned through my mom’s life savings, I enrolled her in Medicaid. iirc, the application form had about 8 different languages printed on it.
Ripped from the headlines
Steve
1 Like
Google tells us
“Spanish is the primary and de facto national language of Mexico, spoken by the vast majority of the population. However, Mexico also recognizes 68 national languages, with 63 being indigenous languages. These indigenous languages include prominent ones like Nahuatl, Maya, and Mixtec.”
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Where I am in Mexico I hear Otomi a few times a week. It is the language of at least 4 different tribes of the Bajio.
3 Likes