It is
estimated that there are over 6,500 living languages around the world. The
exact figure is difficult to determine because language and dialect are not so
easy to distinguish from one another. Since there are literally thousands of
languages in the world, it is natural to assume that there would be many
advantages for someone who can speak than more than one language.
Most commonly spoken
languages
The top
three languages spoken around the world are Mandarin, Spanish and English.
These are three of the six official languages used by the United Nations (the
other are Arabic, French and Russian). There are over 1.2 billion Mandarin
speakers all over the world, half a billion Castilian Spanish speakers and
about 1.5 billion English speakers around the world.
Other most
commonly spoken languages around the world are Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese,
Russian and Japanese. Arabic is one of the world’s most commonly spoken
languages and is spoken by 175 million people around the globe, with ten
variants within spoken Arabic.
