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The 12 most spoken languages in the world..
- Thread starter Mashiane
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I think the graph, while accurate in the number of people speaking each language could give a misleading impression of how 'useful' each language is. I think my order of languages would put them in the order of how many people could use them as a secondary language and would put English (and I know that I am very fortunate to be a native English speaker) at the top followed by Spanish, French and Portugese. Although to be honest in the UK it would not be difficult to find someone who could speak any of the top eight language in the graphic.
You can even see the 100 most-spoken languages 
It's not the same source but the lists matche.
www.b4x.com
It's not the same source but the lists matche.
The 100 Most Spoken Languages Around the World
From: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/100-most-spoken-languages/ What I get from that link: - Most of the spanish-speakers are native speakers. So spanish is very spoken, but no many people learn it. This is different with English. - The modern arabic language has a lot of speakers, but no...
www.b4x.com
Is it talked by the most of people in your town? Or it mixes with other languages in your town?
There are a lot of diffent 'tribes' within the south African sphere thus the 11 official languages to cover most of the people in the country.
We have Afrikaans, Zulu, Sesotho, Ndebele, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, English, Sepedi, and Xhosa.
In most cases we mix the lingo. Like I had to ensure my kids learn English first because at creche people spoke different languages and English was universal as a result their Xhosa has an accent different to how I speak Xhosa.
We have Afrikaans, Zulu, Sesotho, Ndebele, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, English, Sepedi, and Xhosa.
In most cases we mix the lingo. Like I had to ensure my kids learn English first because at creche people spoke different languages and English was universal as a result their Xhosa has an accent different to how I speak Xhosa.
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Mine is Afrikaans - very much related to Flemish and Dutch.
Baie dankie (thank you very much).
Groete (regards)
Johan
Baie dankie (thank you very much).
Groete (regards)
Johan
While working for an international project before a lot of years collaborating with NTUA (National Technical University of Athens) I have met a post graduate student in a French university whose origin was Senegal. They had a lot of languages also there (If I recall correctly 7) and he spoke all of them plus English plus French. This is a total of 9 languages. I can't imagine how difficult this is as my counter stopped at 3 (including my mother language). I have seen a polyglot in YouTube whose way of remembering all the languages he speaks is to describe all the time everything he does in all languages he speaks (f.e. If I would do that I would say in all 3 languages the sentence "today I woke up and ate breakfast with homelet and orange juice..."). Do you speak only Xhosa and English or you speak all of the 11 languages?
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What you did in my opinion was an error. Xhosa as all of the languages of this world is a part of World Human Intelligence Inheritance. By cutting them off or changing the way they are spoken what we do is turning this Inheritance poorer. I have said the same things to some Italian friends who refuse to speak their inherited dialect in favor of common Italian.
I wish I knew how to speak all 11. They joke around that to know a language here, get a girl friend who speaks that language. I have never been that fortunate..
Zulu is almost like Xhosa so I can do that a little bit, but it has its complexities. I have tried Afrikaans to no avail, strangely its one language that I used to pass more than English back then at school. I think its easy but I just don't know it that well. I always enjoy listening to people speaking Tshivenda and Siswati (romantic). Sotho and Setswana are almost identical here and there.
I always think that the best way for education should always be with the mother tongue of a person. This helps in complexities and other things and understanding depths and heights of what is needed to be learnt. For us here is has been very different though.
I couldn't agree with you more. Sadly our education system has not been that favorable, but I guess with time things will evolve and change. Depending on where you are, one or more languages gets marginalized over others.
MANDARIN?
SADLY correct -
but - don't forget that IN PRINCIPLE our education curriculum is supposed to direct that in each province (9) schools teach the main languages of that province - so here in our province that would mean that ALL LEARNERS take English, Afrikaans AND Xhosa. In KZN that would be English, Afrikaans and Zulu etc.
I was in a shuttle one day when I heard some colleagues behind me speaking what sounded to me like a secret language - it turned out to be TshiVenda (which is closely related to Mandabele from Zimbabwe and quite different from other SA languages).
Last night I saw a map of all the Aboriginal groups in Australia - some 240+ each with its own language - the presenter described the map as similar to an area like Europe so that each line demarcating an aboriginal group was the same as a country/international border.
Our President (Cyril R) is reputed to speak most of the official languages of this country - a legacy of his days as a unionist i suppose.
I understand Afrikaans fluently but refuse to speak it - and - oddly enough have not succeeded in getting Xhosa speaking friends to help me learn the language - mainly because they are too keen to learn English. Kids who grew up on the farm here also wanted to learn English because they realised its the lingua franca and anticipated that they would not find work if they could not speak English.
RIGHT the English i learned as kid is Not the English spoken or written today - my linguist and academic friends - though - tell me that languages are and should be dynamic and hence they morph and twist - but this also to me results in their becoming incorrect sematicly (and lets not go into the syntactic incorrrectness one encounters = news anchors and presenters are the worst at torturing languages.)
As @Mashiane says there is a mixture - but in the sense that people use one or other - but there is a lot of use of words from other languages where one doesn't exist in one's home language. The lingua franca has become English - i used to regularly attend many meetings at all levels of society - and these are generally conducted in English - however public meetings are often conducted in the local African language where the audience is predominantly from the African community. etc etc.. It can even depend on the context of the meeting (political, religious, general)- it can be quite dynamic and end up using several languages.
Heck one can also hear people in conversation where one/some speak one language and the responder/s speak a different language. I've done this often myself.
You can't say we don't make things interesting around here.
My native language is English. When I was 39 I started to learn Spanish via 'Spanish with Michel Thomas' as I planned to move to Spain and at that time knew maybe a dozen words. He teaches the rules of the language and how it is structured. As I have had to learn various programming languages over the years from assembler through COBOL, SAS, DCL, C, Basic.. to name a few, I approached it in two ways. Firstly, like learning a new programming language and secondly, like learning a song - repetition. The course is on CD so I listened to each CD, one by one, until I had memorised it.
I'm now 57, have lived in Spain 17 years, and speak pretty fluent Spanish - in my day to day I speak more Spanish than English. It has served me very well as the majority of English in Spain speak very little Spanish so I have had great success working as people find it much easier communicating with someone who can speak their own language.
I think that with English and Spanish you would be able to be understood in a high percentage of countries around the world.
I'm now 57, have lived in Spain 17 years, and speak pretty fluent Spanish - in my day to day I speak more Spanish than English. It has served me very well as the majority of English in Spain speak very little Spanish so I have had great success working as people find it much easier communicating with someone who can speak their own language.
I think that with English and Spanish you would be able to be understood in a high percentage of countries around the world.
Where did you live here?
Tortosa, Tarragona so I speak a bit of Catalan too - but understand more..
I was curious to find our why Marvel's Black Panther chose Xhosa as the language of the fictitious Wakanda. Interesting..
www.inverse.com
'Black Panther': Why Wakandans Speak Xhosa, An Actual African Language
All about Xhosa, the real language that Wakandans speak in 'Black Panther.'
I can't find reference to Mandabele other than a singers name. isiNdebele as spoken by the Ndebele of southern Zimbabwe is actually an Nguni language closely related to Zulu. The reason for this outlier of Nguni is in the history books and makes Putin look like a wimp.
I think you will find tshivenda to be closely related to Shona (the predominant language in Zimbabwe). Shona has a number of links other than tshivenda including the Karanga, Zezuru and even the baKalanga of northern Botswana. Deep in the shadows there is a possible (and intriguing) link between Shona and Swahili in east Africa.
Groete
Ja its a long time since I lived in Zimbabwe so the references have faded. Though I have never heard it termed isiNdebele - but then I tended more to begin learning Shona as the language around the areas we lived - and before opting not to return there.
Interesting snippet of information that - imagine if the producers had chosen Khoi-san.