Current data states that there are only 7 remaining speakers of the language. Written records are available, such as a dictionary and several books that show the grammar and syntax of the Dumi language. Dumi is the world's least spoken language and one of the rarest.
Mandarin (1,118 million speakers)
Looking at total speakers, Mandarin is the second most widely spoken language in the world.
It is mutually intelligible with Guaraní language and both share a common history with Mataco language. Chana is the least spoken language in the world and it has only one native speaker according to UNESCO.
According to the Engco Forecasting Model explained above, the 5 most spoken languages in 2050 will be Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic. The key drivers behind the continued rise in popularity of these languages include population growth, economic predictions and national language policy.
Co-author Professor Lindell Bromham said that of the world's 7,000 recognized languages, around half are currently endangered: “We found that without immediate intervention, language loss could triple in the next 40 years. And by the end of this century, 1,500 languages could cease to be spoken.”
It is one of the rare languages taught in the education system of every country. 125 million people study French around the world (French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, 2022).
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
About 43 percent of the population in the world is bilingual and speak a second language. When you say a person is trilingual, it means that he or she is fluent in three languages. Thirteen percent of the global population is trilingual. A person who can speak four or more languages is multilingual.
The 29 countries are, in alphabetical order: Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Chad, the Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, France, Haiti, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo and Vanuatu.
As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 94 percent is in France. A total of about 97.6 million people worldwide speak French as their mother tongue.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
Icelandic. It belongs to the West Scandinavian group of Norther Germanic languages, just like Faroese, and it is Iceland's mother tongue. As opposed to what you might expect, it has quite a few differences with the other Nordic languages.
In their language difficulty ranking, the Foreign Service Institute puts French in the top ten easiest languages to learn for English-speakers, alongside notoriously easy languages such as Spanish and Italian.
The FSI scale ranks French as a “category I language”, considered “more similar to English” compared to categories III and IV “hard” or “super-hard languages”. According to the FSI, French is one of the easiest languages to learn for a native English speaker.
There unfortunately have not been any wide-ranging studies on language speed. One 2011 study from the Université de Lyon looked at 7 languages, which reported the order as Japanese (7.84 syllables per second), Spanish (7.82), French (7.18), Italian (6.99), English (6.19), German (5.97) and Mandarin (5.18).
People who are fluent in French are commonly referred to as “Francophones”. With a population of 67 million, France has the largest number of French speakers in the world. It is also the country of origin of the language, and the country most commonly associated with French.
One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?
Types of Language Change
Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social group. Language also varies across time. Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays.
A language becomes dormant or extinct when no one can speak it anymore. It becomes doomed when the latest generation of children no longer speak the language. From that point, the last fluent speakers of the language, in their late teens or early twenties, give the language about 75 more years of life.