The Afrikaans language is unique to the African linguistic landscape. A West Germanic language descended from Dutch, brought centuries ago to the area which is now South Africa by Dutch settlers, Afrikaans is considered a ‘daughter language’ of this European language. Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch vernacular of South Holland,

With 23 million speakers, Dutch, a member of the West Germanic language family, is an official language of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, and the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten.  Explorers and pioneers, the Dutch have taken their language with them wherever they have gone.  From the foundations of New York

One of the official languages of the United Nations, French is the official language of 29 countries. Forty percent of speakers residing in Europe, 35% in sub-Saharan Africa and 15% in North Africa and the Middle East. Long a lingua franca for diplomacy and culture, it was given second place among

One hundred million people speak German in Europe, and another 15 million worldwide use the language for communication. It is also important for research and culture – the second most commonly used language, after English, for science, it is also the fifth language in terms of newly published books. German

When considering the truly global languages, one can easily overlook Portuguese, often overshadowed in the world’s classrooms by Spanish. Yet the Portuguese language is nothing if not global – apart from having official status in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, there are over 220 million native speakers, making it

Spanish is a truly global language. The official language of 20 countries, it is one of the world’s most geographically widespread media of communication. It is also a major minority language of the United States, with some 15% of the country speaking Spanish at home. With over 50 million speakers,

A descendant of Old Norse, the language spoken by the Germanic peoples of Scandinavia during the Viking Age (the late 8th century through the 11th century AD), Swedish is the largest North Germanic language. This linguistic subgroup or family also includes Faroese, Danish, Icelandic, and Norwegian. Most of the 10

With just under six million speakers, Croatian belongs to the South Slavic language family, most of whose speakers reside in the Balkans and southern Europe. It may seem unusual to include one of the smaller languages of Europe here on our website, but we have worked with the language for

One hundred and fifty million people have Russian as their native language, and another 110 million use it for communication. One of the world’s most widespread languages, it is spoken from Kaliningrad in Eastern Europe to Vladivostok on the Pacific. It also serves as a lingua franca for the former republics of the

Closely related to Finnish (both are Finnic languages), Estonian has one million native speakers. The two languages are members of the Uralic language family, a classification which includes some 38 languages across northern Eurasia and more than 25 million speakers. Among the Finnic languages, a subgroup of the Uralic family,

Finnish belongs to the Uralic languages, some of whose members are Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian. The ‘odd ones out’ in Europe linguistically, they are unrelated genetically (as linguists term it) to the other, mostly Indo-European languages, of Europe. Many linguists propose a homeland near the Ural Mountains/Volga River area for

A success story linguistically, modern Mandarin Chinese has over a billion native speakers.  More people use Chinese on a daily basis, for business, work, play, than any other language in the world. The fate of Chinese is tied with that of China itself - as the country's influence has grown, so has interest

Although not generally placed among the ‘world languages’ by specialists (a status which English, French, Spanish, and Chinese enjoy), Japanese is nevertheless a language of importance worldwide. With 125 million speakers, most of whom reside in Japan, it forms a language family of its own, with no close linguistic relatives

Fourth on the list of world languages after Chinese, Spanish, and English, modern Standard Hindi claims to descend from the sacred and religious language of ancient India, Sanskrit, from which it derives a majority of its vocabulary. The lingua franca of the so-called ‘Hindi Belt’ of north India, it has

An African Bantu language and one of the eleven official languages of South Africa, Xhosa is spoken by nearly eight million people (18% of the population of South Africa). The African language with the widest distribution in South Africa (Zulu has the most speakers), there are over five million speakers