Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23 percent), followed by Xhosa (16 percent), and Afrikaans (14 percent). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%), but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media. [4]
German-speaking Europe. Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide: [ 7][ 8][ 2][ note 1] Germany (78.3%) Austria (8.4%) Switzerland (5.6%) South Tyrol (0.4%) Others (non-German speaking countries in Europe and non-European countries) (7.3%) The German language is spoken in a number of ...
Most spoken languages, Ethnologue, 2024 [4] Language Family Branch First-language (L1) speakers Second-language (L2) speakers Total speakers (L1+L2) English (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Germanic: 380 million 1.135 billion 1.515 billion Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 941 ...
Some native speakers of Bantu languages and English also speak Afrikaans as a second language. It is widely taught in South African schools, with about 10.3 million second-language students. [1] Afrikaans is offered at many universities outside South Africa, including in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Russia and the United States. [85]
The family's most extensive branch, the Semitic languages (including Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew among others), is the only branch of Afroasiatic that is spoken outside Africa. [9] Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia), Somali (Cushitic), Berber (Berber ...
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [ nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
The German language area is characterized by a range of different dialects. [12] There is a written and spoken standard language but there are also large differences in the usage of the standard and the local dialects. [12] The flight and expulsion of Germans broke down the isolation of dialect areas.
In Namibia, Afrikaans holds a more universal role than in South Africa, across ethnic groups and races and is the spoken lingua franca in the capital Windhoek and throughout most of central and southern Namibia. There are pockets where German is commonly spoken. English is the sole official language. [citation needed]