Spoken Languages
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Revision as of 17:09, 9 February 2013 by Dan Tobias (Talk | contribs)
Spoken language is believed to date back 50,000 to 100,000 years, and is considered to be one of the major things that distinguish humans from animals. It long predates Written Languages.
The languages with the largest number of native speakers are:
- Mandarin
- Spanish
- English
- Arabic languages
- Hindi
- Bengali
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Japanese
- German
A major issue is that languages are collapsing as worldwide networking increases - the larger languages outstrip the smaller communities, and entire sets of languages are lost. A number of projects are underway to catalog these dying or disappearing languages.
Artificially constructed languages
In addition to the languages which have evolved naturally among humans, some languages have been artificially constructed, sometimes as part of fictional universes and other times intended for actual use in communication.
"Serious" artificial languages
- Esperanto
- Interlingua
- Ithkuil
- Loglan
- Volapük
"Fictional" artificial languages
- Elvish (Tolkien)
- Klingon (Star Trek)
- Pakuni (Land of the Lost)
- Simlish (The Sims)
