The scientists (in what sounds like an excellent idea for a research trip), recorded bits of informal language from 5 continents, and of the 31 dialects they compiled, My first thought in reading their findings was “hmmm”. That word is “huh”.Īccording to a recent study it seems to be pretty universal. Words may share roots and flit across language barriers, but because there’s such a vast number of sounds a human can make, it’s very unlikely that we’d all spontaneously come up with the same word for the same thing.
That’s because, of course, words are arbitrary.Ĭat (or katze or chat) only means “cat” because at some stage people came to agree that it did.
NUMBERS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES 12 PDF
El abrazo del padre danilo montero pdf gratis. You can’t just “work out” what the German word for “fridge” is. Still, the data gives you an idea of the size of a given language community.Īs anyone who has tried to blag a vocab test will know, words really don’t have any logic to them. Note: Population numbers are constantly changing, so when you read this post, these numbers will already be out of date.
Languages appear in order by number of individuals older than 5 who use a language other than English in the home. Below is information about the nine most widely spoken languages in America after English. Languages Ranked by Number of Speakers So we’ve talked about how many languages are spoken in America, but we haven’t looked at what those languages are.