Languages in the World

Something forgotten, but important. Check 'em out here !!!
The Most Language
Papua New Guinea has the greatest concentration of separate languages in the world, with more than 10 percent of the world's total of 4-5,000.

Comment: What 'bout Indonesia???? Many languages in here, but the more languages come in to Indonesia,                        the  more languages are dead.>.<


The Most Commonly Spoken
The language used by more people as their native  tongue than any other is Mnadarin, spoken by an estimated 68 percent of China's population (770 million people in 1990). The next commonly spoken language, and the most widespread, is English, with an estimated 330 million native speakers. Nearly twice as many use it as  a second or third language.

The Most Complex
Chippewa, the North American Indian language, has the most verb forms, with up to 6,000. The Inuit languages uses 63 forms of present tense.

Irregular Verbs
Turkish has only one irregular verb - olmak, meaning 'to be'. English has over 25 irregular verbs.


The Commonest Sound
No language is known to be without the vowel 'a' (as in the English word 'father".)

Alphabets
The language with the most letters is Cambodian, with 74 (including, some without any current use). Rotokas, one of Papua New Guinea's 500 languages, has the least letters, with 11 (a,b,e,g,i,k,o,p,r,t and u).


English Vocabulary
The English language contains about 490,000 words plus another 300,000 technical terms, the msot in any language, but it is doubtful if any individual uses more that 60,000. British people who had a full 16 years of education use perhaps  5,000 words in speech and up to 10,000 words in written communications. Shakespeare used a vocabulary of about 33,000 words.


Cited from The Guiness Book of Records