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A basic guide to constructing languages and beginning linguistics.

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By its nature, speculative fiction takes us to strange new worlds, and with strange new worlds comes the potential for strange new languages. This probably brings to mind Tolkien's Elvish languages or Marc Okrand's Klingon. These are such rich, lifelike languages that they give an additional level of depth to those cultures. Most of us, though, aren't scholars and linguists like Tolkien and Okrand. Don't worry. You don't need to be to add some linguistic depth to your worldbuilding. Creating a relatively simple naming language can do the trick.

What's a Naming Language?

A naming language is a basic constructed language (conlang) with limited vocabulary and grammar. Naming languages are used primarily for naming places and characters. A solid, well developed naming language could also be used for phrases. A naming language could develop into a full conlang eventually, but only a few steps are needed to get naming.

1. Pick Your Sounds

Decide on what sounds you want to include in your language. You could use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) here, but it's not necessary. You could choose your sounds based on and described by English, but it'll be harder to make it interesting and different. For the middle road, you need to know that linguists define consonants by two characteristics: place of articulation and manner of articulation (mostly characterized by the degree of closure of the lips). This creates a grid.

English has gaps in the grid, so choosing sounds that fill those gaps and deleting sounds to create new gaps is a great way to make it so your naming language doesn't sound like English.

Vowels can also be organized in a basic grid, defined by height (of the tongue in the mouth) and frontness (the tongue's position front to back). More layers of vowel distinctions include the shape of the lips (o vs. e) and the length (long or short in English).

2. Build a Lexicon

In real languages, place names tend to be descriptive and people's names mean something, or at least did at one time. Thus, a good place to start your lexicon is with geographical terms, like river and mountain, and common nouns, like tree and bird. Then add to your vocabulary some associated modifiers. Basic adjectives are great - you can put together names like rocky mountain or tall tree. You could also add some verbs and adverbs to get singing river or silly bird. As you continue with your worldbuilding or storytelling, add new words to your lexicon. Just remember to be consistent with the sounds you chose earlier.

3. Write a Grammar

For a naming language, you won't need much grammar. You probably won't need rules for complicated sentence structure or multiple vowel tenses. Even for names, though, you'll want to determine some basics. In English, adjectives come before nouns they modify, so we have the Great Lakes - but in Spanish, it's reversed, thus the Rio Grande. Plurals and capitalization are also likely to come up in naming, so create a rule for how to handle those situations.

You may find you need to make additional grammar decisions as you build your naming language, like whether to use compound words or not. As you do with your lexicon, keep track of whatever grammar rules you invent so you can stay consistent.

Try to think through the implications of rules as well, since grammar can get complicated over otherwise simple ideas. In English, plurals are simple when you just add an s to the end, but get difficult when combined with words that already end in s.

4. Choose a Writing System

This step is not necessary in all cases. If you are looking for a language that sounds different, you'll have one by the end of step three. At this point you can do everything (map labels, names, phrases) with an English alphabet translation. The result will be like English maps or guidebooks of foreign places. But if you also want it to look different, you can go a step further and create a simple writing system too. There are three basic writing systems:

Alphabets use letters, typically less than 50, to represent sounds.

Syllabaries use symbols to represent syllables, and typically need about 100.

Logographies use characters to represent words, and typically require hundreds.

Within each are different varieties and subsets, and natural languages can use a combination of elements. After you decide what system will work best for you, you can choose or create the characters to fit. For ease and clarity, it's a good idea to make each character unique. In natural languages, cultures tend to add distinguishing features to characters that are too similar.

Tips, Tricks and Other Things to Consider

There are a lot of interesting spoken and written languages here on earth. Studying some of them, at least a little, can help keep your naming language from behaving too much like any single one. They are also a wonderful source of inspiration.

Keep it pronounceable. Words that are too different can act like breaks in the flow of a story as the reader stops and tries to figure it out. Try for a balance between the unfamiliar and the cumbersome.

Clichés are found in conlangs, too. There's dozens of conlangs with an overdose of dashes and apostrophes, or an evil speech impediment that causes villains to only speak in harsh consonants.

Are you developing a naming language for an alien race? Think about how the shape of the mouth could affect the sounds in your language. There are also possibilities other than spoken language for communication between aliens.

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By its nature, speculative fiction takes us to strange new worlds, and with strange new worlds comes the potential for strange new languages. This probably brings to mind Tolkien's Elvish languages or Marc Okrand's Klingon. These are such rich, lifelike languages that they give an additional level of depth to those cultures.

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Basic Greetings, Manners and Phrases in BSL for Beginners

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How language affects what we think about time...

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How language affects what we think about time...

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If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?

These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.

In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think - from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.

The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language - we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.

It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.

Mandarin speakers often envision time as a vertical line where down represents the future (Credit: Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon/Alamy)

Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.

There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts - for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.
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Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read - with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.

This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.

Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button - in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction - particularly if they learn both languages from an early age.

We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation b y training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.

But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.

In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.

Do you carry an umbrella with you tomorrow, or did you need it yesterday? The answer might depend on the language you speak (Credit: Ian Barnes/Getty Images)

Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking - people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".

And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".

The same is also true in Spanish.

"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it."

Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown - they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around.

Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers - and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration ( tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration ( duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language.

These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places - there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around - and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.

Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe - which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously - as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been - and still is - holding back physics. ( Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)

"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.

Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present - we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" - you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".

But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker - but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen.

The Aymara people reason that because we cannot see the future, it must be behind us (Credit: Jenny Matthews/Alamy)

It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.

They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children - in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.

But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world - influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions - north, south, east, west - to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame - the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.

But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation - such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer).

And this can shape how we think - and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."

In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".

Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate - it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.

In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language."

Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.

Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car".

Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to.

As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".

But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.

* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?

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The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

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The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.

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Ever wondered what the most widely spoken languages are in the world? Although there are currently more than 7,000 languages, more than half of the world's population speak 23 of them only.

Whether it's the melodic tones of Spanish, the rich intricacies of Mandarin, or the rhythmic cadence of English, mastering these top tongues will open doors to new cultures and opportunities

Knowing this information is essential to understand if you're planning a global expansion strategy and levelling up in the business world. Additionally, whether in the workplace or personal development, knowledge of more than one language offers us new horizons and the opportunity to expand our cultural understanding.

From the languages that English speakers will find easy to learn, to the more difficult languages, we've compiled this all-encompassing list for you based on real data.

So keep reading to find out what the most spoken languages are.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2021 and has been completely updated and revamped for accuracy and comprehensiveness as of 2023.
1. English (1,452 million speakers)

According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

Like Latin or Greek at the time, English has become the world's common language. It is the default language in international business, tourism, technology, and much more.

A bilingual person who speaks Spanish and English can understand 1 in 3 people who connect to the Internet. They can also access over 60% of everything published on the web.

2. Mandarin (1,118 million speakers)

Looking at total speakers, Mandarin is the second most widely spoken language in the world. However, it's the most spoken language in the world if you count only first-language (native) speakers due to China's significant population.

Mandarin is not actually a language, but a set of dialects of the Chinese language. What unifies these dialects under the same name is that their speakers can understand each other.

3. Hindi (602+ million speakers)

Hindi is, along with English, one of the 22 official languages of India, the second most inhabited country in the world. India's incredible linguistic diversity (more than 121 languages coexist) explains the high rate of non-native speakers who use it as a lingua franca. In addition to India, Hindi is spoken by over a quarter of the population of Nepal!

4. Spanish (548+ million speakers)

Spanish is the second most widely spoken language globally in terms of native speakers. In addition, it is the most spoken of the Romance languages and the third most used on the internet.

Spain's enormous colonial expansion took this language not only to the Americas but also to Africa and Asia. Today, there are 21 Spanish-speaking countries in the world, with dozens more that have a significant Spanish-speaking population. Interestingly, the United States is the second country with the largest number of Spanish speakers in the world!
Download your beautiful visual, FREE Spanish Essentials eBook to help you begin learning Spanish.
5. French (280 million speakers)

Like Spanish and English, French spread throughout the world along with the French colonial empire. Today, there are 29 French-speaking countries all around the world!

If English is the language of business, then French is considered the language of culture. Its enormous importance is also reflected in the fact that it is the third language with the largest number of non-native speakers.

6. Modern Standard Arabic (274 million speakers)

Did you know that Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the only language on this list without native speakers? Indeed, Arabic is a large language with many different dialects, and all Arabic speakers grow up speaking a local dialect, like Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Mesopotamian Arabic or another local variety.

So, how does MSA have so many non-native speakers? That's because MSA is commonly used in newspapers, TV broadcasts, and movies, but people don't speak it with each other. It's an academic language that you'll find in literature in politics, but not in everyday life. As such, if you're interested in learning Arabic, you're better off starting with one dialect and then learning MSA to widen your horizons.

7. Bengali (272+ million speakers)

Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh and is also spoken in some areas of India and Burma. It may come as a surprise that a language spoken in such a small region appears in a list of the most spoken languages in the world. However, it makes sense when you think about the population density of that region.

8. Russian (258+ million speakers)

Less surprising is the inclusion of Russian among the most widely spoken languages globally considering that Russia is the largest country in the world by territory. Plus, while Russian is the official language of only four countries, it's widely spoken in 19 countries. Did you know that it's also the language with the highest number of native speakers in all of Europe?

9. Portuguese (257+ million speakers)

Portuguese is another language that expanded worldwide during the European colonial period. Today, Portuguese is the official language of nine countries in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia. Brazil is the largest country out of those nine and has the most Portuguese speakers. Brazil's large population makes Portuguese the most widely spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere!

10. Urdu (231.3 million speakers)

Urdu is one of the two official languages in Pakistan and is also widely used in certain regions of India. The spoken part of Urdu is widely intelligible with Hindi, as both speakers can understand each other without much issue. However, Urdu uses a modified Persian script for its alphabet, while Hindi uses Sanskrit.

11. Indonesian (199 million speakers)

Bahasa Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world. Peculiarly, it's not the native language of most of its speakers. Rather, it's a second language necessary for mutual understanding in a country with more than 200 languages.

12. German (134.6 million speakers)

German is, of course, the official language of Germany. Unlike its other European counterparts, it's mostly spoken in Europe, with only Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Luxembourg having sizeable German-speaking populations. With that said, learning German is incredibly popular relative to its small population, ranking as the fifth most studied language in the world.

13. Japanese (125.4 million speakers)

Japanese is the first language on this list that is entirely spoken within one country. In fact, over 99% of Japanese people speak Japanese as their native language! With that said, learning Japanese is extremely popular among people who want to enjoy Japanese culture and do business with the third-largest economy in the world.

14. Nigerian Pidgin (120.7 million speakers)

Nigeria is one of the fastest-growing countries in terms of population. Indeed, it is estimated that the West African country will be the fourth-largest country in the world in terms of population by 2050 - just a hair behind the U.S. We can expect the Nigerian Pidgin to climb on this list in the coming decades following Nigeria's population boom.

15. Marathi (99.1 million speakers)

Marathi is the third most common language in India, with most of its speakers concentrated in the state of Maharashtra. This language has existed in its current form for about 1,300 years, making it one of the oldest languages in the world!

16. Telugu (95.7 million speakers)

Telugu is the fourth most common language in India, right behind Marathi. Telugu is predominantly spoken in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, although it's also the official language of several other states. It is a part of the Dravidian language family, which has been around for about 5,000 years.

17. Turkish (88.1 million speakers)

Turkish is the official language of - you guessed it - Turkey. What you may not know is that Turkish used to be written in a modified version of the Arabic alphabet until 1928, when it was replaced by the Roman alphabet. There are sizeable Turkish-speaking populations in Cyprus, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece and other European states.

18. Tamil (86.4 million speakers)

Tamil is the fifth most common language in India, with a sizeable presence in the state of Tamil Nadu. It's also commonly spoken in Sri Lanka and Singapore by Tamil people. Tamil is considered the oldest living language in the world, with a history spanning more than 5,000 years!

19. Yue Chinese (85.6 million speakers)

Yueh Chinese is a group of closely-related Chinese dialects. The most popular of these dialects is Cantonese, which is spoken predominantly in the Guangdong province of mainland China as well as in Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also popular among overseas communities, making it one of the most common dialects of Chinese outside of China.

20. Vietnamese (85.3 million speakers)

The Vietnamese language has six tones and is, of course predominantly spoken in Vietnam. However, did you know that it is also recognized as an official language in the Czech Republic, and can therefore be used in courts and official radio and television broadcasts?

There you have it! That's the list of the 20 most spoken languages in the world. Are you inspired to open your world with language skills and culture? Discover all the languages Berlitz has to offer here.
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20 Most Spoken Languages in the World in 2023 | Berlitz

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More than half of the world's population speaks only 23 out of 7000 existing languages. Keen to know which are the most spoken languages ​​in the world?

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Do you know the worlds weirdest languages?

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Do you know the worlds weirdest languages?

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Is English a "weird" language? Many of us might feel this is true when we're trying to explain its complex spelling rules, or the meanings of idioms such as "it's raining cats and dogs" to someone who is learning it. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task.

Their aim was to find out which languages had the largest number of features that differed most from other languages. In this survey, English came in 33rd position out of 239 languages. So it definitely has more atypical features than over 80% of the other languages in the survey.

English sounds strange

English probably sounds a little "weird" to many speakers of other languages. According to the WALS, the average number of distinctive speech sounds in the world's languages is about 25-30-known as "phonemes." , an indigenous language spoken in the Amazon region of Brazil, has an unusually small set of phonemes. It has eight consonants, and just three vowels: /i/, /a/, and /o/. In contrast, Taa-also known as !Xóõ) is a language in southern Africa which has more than 100 phonemes, including many different types of click sounds. Sign languages, such as British Sign Language or American Sign Language, do not use sounds at all. Signs are, instead, composed out of combinations of handshapes, movements of the hands, and locations on or near the body of the signer.

The question of questions

English grammar is also sometimes unusual. English uses varying word orders to distinguish between questions and statements-meaning that the subject of the sentence precedes the verb in statements. Take the phrase "life is a box of chocolates" for example. Here, the order is subject ("life") followed by the verb ("is"). In the question, "is life a box of chocolates?," the order of these elements is reversed.

In a WALS survey of 955 languages, fewer than 2% of languages in the sample used English-like differences in sentence structure for questions. Over 50% of the languages added a question particle to differentiate a question from a statement.

In Japanese, for example, you add the question particle "ka" to a statement to turn it into a question. The second most common strategy in WALS was to change the intonation pattern, such as changing a falling intonation pattern (for a statement) to a rising one (for a question). In contrast, Mixtec (an indigenous language of Mexico) is a highly atypical language because it does not use any grammatical strategy to distinguish between questions and statements.
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