Lingua franca and List of languages by number of native speakers

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Difference between Lingua franca and List of languages by number of native speakers

Lingua franca vs. List of languages by number of native speakers

A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vernacular language, or link language is a language or dialect systematically used to make communication possible between people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both native languages. This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers.

Arabic

Arabic (العَرَبِيَّة) or (عَرَبِيّ) or) is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living from Mesopotamia in the east to the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, and in the Sinai peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. As the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities, and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government, and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic (fuṣḥā), which is the official language of 26 states and the liturgical language of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era, especially in modern times. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have also borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages, mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Valencian and Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid 9th to mid 10th centuries. Many of these words relate to agriculture and related activities (Hull and Ruffino). Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have also acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. Some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Urdu, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Hindi, Malay, Maldivian, Indonesian, Pashto, Punjabi, Tagalog, Sindhi, and Hausa, and some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, and contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times. Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims and Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography.

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Dialect

The term dialect (from Latin,, from the Ancient Greek word,, "discourse", from,, "through" and,, "I speak") is used in two distinct ways to refer to two different types of linguistic phenomena.

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English language

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now a global lingua franca.

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First language

A first language, native language or mother/father/parent tongue (also known as arterial language or L1) is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period.

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French language

French (le français or la langue française) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family.

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Global language system

The global language system is the "ingenious pattern of connections between language groups".

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Greek language

Greek (Modern Greek: ελληνικά, elliniká, "Greek", ελληνική γλώσσα, ellinikí glóssa, "Greek language") is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

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Hindi

Hindi (Devanagari: हिन्दी, IAST: Hindī), or Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी, IAST: Mānak Hindī) is a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language.

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Hindustani language

Hindustani (हिन्दुस्तानी, ہندوستانی, ||lit.

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Indonesian language

Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia) is the official language of Indonesia.

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Italian language

Italian (or lingua italiana) is a Romance language.

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Javanese language

Javanese (colloquially known as) is the language of the Javanese people from the central and eastern parts of the island of Java, in Indonesia.

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List of languages by total number of speakers

A number of sources have compiled lists of languages by their number of speakers. However, all such lists should be used with caution.

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Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China.

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Persian language

Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi (فارسی), is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.

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Portuguese language

Portuguese (português or, in full, língua portuguesa) is a Western Romance language originating from the regions of Galicia and northern Portugal in the 9th century.

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Russian language

Russian (rússkiy yazýk) is an East Slavic language, which is official in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely spoken throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

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Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian, is a Western Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native speakers in Latin America and Spain.

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Turkish language

Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and Western Thrace) and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia).

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Urdu

Urdu (اُردُو ALA-LC:, or Modern Standard Urdu) is a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language.

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World language

A world language is a language that is spoken internationally and is learned and spoken by a large number of people as a second language.

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