Sean Calvert, age 70, of Portland, Me., for his question of the month:
HOW MANY DIFFERENT LANGUAGES ARE THERE?
We don't have accurate information on how language began but there are a number of good theories. One suggests that at first language was an imitation of natural sounds, such as barks, groans and grunts. Another says it might have been sounds accompanied with gestures and other body movements. In any case, spoken language began long before we had a written language.
It might be hard to believe, but scholars say there are more than 3,000 different spoken languages now being used. And this number does not include the dialects or local forms of a language.
It is true that many of the world's languages are spoken only by small groups of people. Only 13 languages have 50 million or more speakers.
The language with the largest number of speakers is Chinese. More than 750 million people speak this language. Second on the list with 400 million speakers is English with Hindustani coming in third with about 300 million.
Rounding out the list of 13 languages with more than 50 million speakers each is (in order of ranking) Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese, Indonesian, French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic and Bengali.
Some scholars believe that all of the world's languages came from the same original tongue. They have classified family language groups, with Indo European being the most important. More than 1.75 billion persons or about 50 percent of the world's entire population speak languages in this family group.
Indo European language family has eight branches: (1) Germanic or Teutonic, which includes English, German, Dutch Flemish and the Scandinavian tongues of Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish; (2) Romance including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian; (3) Balto Slavic including Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo Croatian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian and Latvian; (4) Indo Iranian including Hindustani, Bengali, Persian and Pashto; (5) Greek; (6) Celtic including Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh and Breton; (7) Albanian; and (8) Armenian.
All Indo European languages have the same original structure based on inflections. All have defined parts of speech including nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs.
Second grouping behind the Indo European language family is the Sino Tibetan family with about 865 million speakers. Included in this group are Chinese with its many dialects, Thai, Burmese and Tibetan.
Third classification with 150 million speakers is the Afro Asiatic family (which includes Arabic and Hebrew) with the 100 million speakers of the Uralic and Altaic (Turkish, Mongol and Manchu) family in fourth place.