International languages and English
|
|
There are approximately 5000 different languages and many dialects or local versions of major languages in the world. The oldest written language is Egyptian, but now Egyptian is not a widely spread language. The most popular languages are Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and Russian. The most difficult languages are North American Indian language of Minnesota and Oregon, Tabassaran, Esqimaux and Chinese. The simplest language is Esperanto. It was invented by a Polish doctor, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof in 1887. This language was invented to be a world language because of its simplicity, but now only 10 millions people speak Esperanto. Now the world language is English. It is one of 7 international languages, one of 6 languages of the United Nations, common language of NATO, aviation language and the first language of international sport. English is an official language of UK, America, Canada, Australia and other English-speaking countries. But English in the UK is not the only language people are speaking. There are a lot of minority languages in the UK. There are about 80000 Gaelic speakers and over half a million Welsh speakers. There are also some other languages that had come with the emigrants. These languages are: Bengali, Turkish, Gujarati, Spanish, Greek, Urdu, Punjabi, Chinese, Italian, Arabic, French and Portuguese. There is also a great amount of dialects of English. There are some idioms connected with languages: pidgin English – dialect, spoken by people, who came to Great Britain from Papua New Guinea and the Far East for trading; broken English means badly spoken, corrupted language; Queen’s English – correct, clear and intelligible English. English belongs to the Indo-European language family, more exactly, to the West Germanic subgroup of the Germanic languages. |
