We in the English-speaking group don't think about other language families. English seems to be dominant in so many areas that we might not even think about other languages.
How many language families are there? There are 141 language families and 7,111 living human languages within the 141 different families.
Membership of languages is established by comparative linguistics. Just like plants - they are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship.
We also don't think about which is the most-spoken language. That's because English is dominant in many communications. It's 983 million speakers fall behind Mandarin Chinese with 1.1 billion speakers. Next is Hinustani at 544 million.
Another retrieval says that there are 1.121 billion speakers of English and 1.107 billion speakers of Chinese. Or perhaps there are as many as 1.5 billion using English to some extent. The native English speakers number 375 million.
What would the scenario be like if Chinese surpassed English in Global speakers? How would that change things?
When I worked in computers, the universal language for comments and descriptions is English - computer code is required to have English descriptors. I worked on a project where the software was developed in Morocco and it was written in French, so it would not be allowed in a government department given it failed this mandatory requirement.
I wonder how many fields and professions require English for similar things. I would think that STEM would be the area that requires a common set of standards and practises. The Oxford-Royale.co.uk side says this is the case - 80% of scientific texts are written in English.
Academia, Online businesses, Tourism, Diplomacy, management consultancy and finally Finance are the top areas that require good English. So I guess that covers a lot of jobs around the world.
Look at the 'trunk' on this bonsai azalea at Longwood.
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