Languages Page
By Pete, Addy, and Katherine
This page is about the languages of the world. As you saw on the FrontPage, this project is based on the book If The World Were A Village by David J. Smith. In this book, the world is reduced to a village of 100 people, with one person equalling about 64 million people. This is done to make numbers easier to comprehend, and make percentages easier to understand. Therefore, with so many people in the real world, compared to the Global Village, the numbers have to be rounded, to make them work in the Global Village. In this Wiki, we aim to go over and above the data in the book. ~ Pete and Katherine
Heritage Speakers
This term means that a person speaks a language other than English; if they speak English also it still counts. This refers to many children, as one out of five kids begin school with their primary language something other than English. Sadly, most of these languages only survive three generations at most. Schools in America often help this happen, as most schools supress and ignore these languages when teaching English. As teenagers, most heritage speakers have almost lost all of their native language. There are efforts to keep languages alive though. To learn more about this topic, take a look at this great website: http://www.cal.org/heritage/.
~Pete
Languages in the Global Village
This doughnut chart shows the main languages of the world. Of course, if all of the languages in the world were on this chart, it would be illegible because of how many were there. So in this graph we just gave the eight most spoken languages of the world and an “other languages” category. The most widely spoken language is the Mandarin dialect of Chinese. This is included in the “Chinese” category, with 18% of the 21% percent of all Chinese being Mandarin. This might surprise most Americans, because they think that English is predominant. Actually, English is second.
I think it is interesting that Hindi is spoken as much as English, the small amount of 9%. Hindi is spoken in India, and the population there is growing rapidly; so even though the United States is bigger, the number of speakers of each language, English and Hindi, is the same. This is mainly due to population density. To learn more about population, click Here to go to the Population page.~Pete and Addy
Languages in the United States of America
I got this pie chart from http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/USlanguages.html.
It shows the languages spoken in the United States. As you can see, these numbers show a large disparity from the numbers on the languages of the world graph. Just 17.9% of the U.S.' population speaks a language other than English. If you look, it is possible to see lines connecting the smaller slice of the big pie to the smaller pie. This means that the smaller chart is actually the "Other" category. As one would expect, Spanish is the largest other language of the United States. Then you get to all of the minority languages, which are clumped together into categories for them to show up. The next most popular language is French, coming in at 0.61%. That seems small compared to Spanish, but it is really 160 thousand people! Spanish is 28 million people, and English only is a whopping 216 million people! In comparision to the world's population, the number of people seems smaller. (In case you didn't know, the most recent estimate of the world's population is roughly 6.5 billion). If you want to know more about the individual divides, look at the link above.
The number of Spanish speakers in the United States is predicted to grow almost exponentially. 14.3 million babies were born in 2006, and about four million of those were Hispanic. Think about it.~ Pete
Fun Facts
- There are approximately 6,800 languages in the world. (Not including local dialects. Dialects are slight local variations of a language.)
- About two thirds are only spoken, and the rest have writing systems, too.
- A language family means that the languages are related by common descent from a root language, such as Latin.
- The study of language is called linguistics.
- A loan word is a word that has been directly pulled from another language, and could be modifed slightly in some cases. Spaghetti is one of these, borrowed from Italian.
- The word language comes from lingua, a Latin word meaning tongue, hence the reason that languages are sometimes called tongues.
- There are more than 200 languages in the world with more than a million speakers.
- Of these, 23 are really huge. Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, English, French, German, Hindi, Iitalian, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Malay-Indonesian, Mandarin, Marathi, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Wu have over 50 million speakers.
~Pete
Resources
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Comments (Show all 48)
Shelby said
at 12:02 pm on Feb 13, 2008
Hey Guys! The page is great, but U might want to stop the flags. I LUV the greetings at the bottom
May said
at 12:08 pm on Feb 13, 2008
Pretty good. But you might want to slow it dowwwwwwwwn a bit.
Pete said
at 12:12 pm on Feb 13, 2008
May, what do you mean slow it down? Please explain.
Pete said
at 12:14 pm on Feb 13, 2008
Shelby, i cant stiop the flags, and they are the only fluff on our page , so i am going to keep them. Thanks for the advice though. The nationalites page is doing great too!
shoshie the shoshie said
at 12:17 pm on Feb 13, 2008
This page is really coool. I don't have a lot of critical comments, ecxept for the fact that you may be able to move a flag to make the fluff spread out.
pete said
at 9:30 am on Feb 15, 2008
I don't want to move the flags, cuz that would ruin the the effect. PLZ give us some sugestions for more CONTENT, and content only.
pete said
at 9:31 am on Feb 15, 2008
Addy, c'mon, help a bit ! Now Katherine is doing more work than you!
Amos said
at 10:39 am on Feb 15, 2008
I really really like this page it is educational and cool
Pet E. said
at 10:47 am on Feb 25, 2008
need commebnts to survive.....
Maggie-May said
at 11:11 am on Feb 25, 2008
THE BRIGHT GREEN IS A BIT TACKY!
Brian said
at 11:16 am on Feb 25, 2008
what are "commebnts?"
Pet E. said
at 11:19 am on Feb 25, 2008
Brian - hah - you know what it means, quiit makin fun of my typing. Maggie m,ay, is cool and it comes withe the bamboo skin.
na\'im said
at 11:50 am on Mar 3, 2008
I think that the content is good but you need to put you resources on the the resources page and get rid of one flag
Ellie said
at 11:50 am on Mar 3, 2008
Margaret, if the bright green is just a bit tacky, why did you put it all in capitals? You don need to be so cranky.
Da Niel said
at 12:03 pm on Mar 3, 2008
I like this page. Ellie what did u mean when u said don?
Ellie said
at 12:09 pm on Mar 3, 2008
Look at Baggie-Bay's comment. What do you mean by "when u said don?"?
Ellie said
at 12:10 pm on Mar 3, 2008
Pete, what does quiit mean?
Isaac said
at 12:13 pm on Mar 3, 2008
why do we need to know who wrote the paragraph?
Da Niel said
at 2:09 pm on Mar 4, 2008
Y u have to b soooooo nosy Ellie?
na\'im said
at 2:28 pm on Mar 4, 2008
take away the link on the title.
Le Pie (Pete) said
at 9:13 am on Mar 7, 2008
Quit makking fun of typing eroors!!!!!!! Make comments on important stuff!!!!! Or else !!!!!
Le Pie (Pete) said
at 9:15 am on Mar 7, 2008
Na\'im - THe link on the title is nessecary. And you said earliear to put our resources on the resources page - we did! and ther properli sited too! Sbout flags - read my earlier comments on this issue. they still aplpy.
Da Niel said
at 9:43 am on Mar 7, 2008
Pete, your grammar is kinda weird. reread your thingy that u rote
Emipoo said
at 10:02 am on Mar 7, 2008
U gys nead too fics sum stuf it ante soe grate moste stufs R da saam tings U nead knew staff
Andrea Bittle said
at 1:20 pm on Mar 16, 2008
I think this page is fabulous. I really like your fun facts section also. I learned more about languages than I ever knew! Super job....
Walter said
at 1:04 pm on Mar 18, 2008
The colors in the graph look to much a like i think u should ether change the colors or make the color keys bigger because i'm kind of comfused
Ro Han said
at 2:07 pm on Mar 19, 2008
Pete, this page is excellent. Spelling errors hardly matter if you can still read the word. But the thing that disturbs me is every paragraph is written by YOU! I thought there were other people in your group >:(!
maggie-may said
at 5:10 pm on Mar 19, 2008
Yeah, don't put the author of each paragraph. It seems over-possesive. I noticed that Katherine didn't have anythig by her. if she doesn't work on the page, you should take her name off the top. I don't mean to discredit Katherine, but if she didn't do anything for the group her name shouldn't be at the top. I also think that when you put the author of the paragraph (if you must) than you should make sure that you are putting all CONTRIBUTERS to the paragraph (if one person researched and another typed). just make sure all credits are correct.
Jiyu said
at 1:20 pm on Mar 30, 2008
Hey guys, I think this page rocks. It gives great info and all. Even though languages was hard, you wrapped your page up really well.
Qajar said
at 3:49 pm on Apr 23, 2008
I can't comprehend the doughnut graph. The typing looks all broken up.
snoopy said
at 10:42 am on Apr 28, 2008
It was weird how most people speak different languages than the ones listed. I didn't that 39% was a lot but in the graph it was amazing how much people it was.
손창현 said
at 10:47 am on Apr 28, 2008
I don't know about 6,800 languages in the world and 200 languages in the world with more than a million speakers.(that's awesome)
rebecca said
at 10:48 am on Apr 28, 2008
the wiki ROX so does snoopy
rebecca said
at 10:52 am on Apr 28, 2008
It was very surprising that there 6800 languages in the whole world, and it awesome
maggielouh@... said
at 1:26 pm on Jul 2, 2008
Pete- I don't like how you put your name after the articles. You guys are a team.If people didn't do anything, take their name off the top!!
Niya Mitchell said
at 9:56 pm on Dec 8, 2008
It says there are about 6,800 different languages in our world. Because the global village has the majority of people speaking Chinese, does that mean the most people in our real world speak Chinese?
Mia said
at 5:08 pm on Dec 9, 2008
Sure, I guess you could say that Niya. ;)
Mia said
at 5:53 pm on Dec 17, 2008
Are you talking about Mandarin Chinese? Or Cantonese? Now I'm confused.
nyawira said
at 4:55 pm on Jan 16, 2009
hey niya mia it is cool that there are 6800 languages in the whole world!few!!!!!!
Jinny said
at 2:07 pm on Jan 18, 2009
tHE FIRST GRAPH(THE ONE BY aDDY) tHE 9 FOR eNGLISH IS LIKE A 4.
~jINNY
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