Language In the World

Every since man started walking on the earth, she has had a need to express herself. It has been all the way from sounds, messages cut in stone, to noises and language we speak today.

On our planet, there are about 6000 languages spoken. The five biggest languages are: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali and Hindi. 885 million people have Mandarin as their native language. In spite of that English (332 million) is dominating the media. Most of the movies, TV-series, etc, on TV are produced in English.

In Swedish nine-year compulsary schools the pupils are offered to learn a third language besides Swedish and English. It's often German or French, but the last couple of years, also Spanish. In the upper secondary school there are more options, for example Italian, Russian, Chinese and sign language.

Because of the many English-language programs and movies on TV also theatres, webpages, TV- and computer games in English, people are fed with the immoderately popular language. The grammar of the language isn't more difficult than learning Swedish grammar.

From left: a movie in English, a Swedish-Spanish dictionary and a Swedish-English dictionary.

Language has changed thoughout times. In about 20 years, English will probably take more place in the world, than it does today. The five biggest languages, which were mentioned before, will most likely become even bigger. But that leads to smaller languages disappearing to a greater extent.

If the countries in the EU have founed one common state in 20 years, the sum of spoken languages will not be the same as the number of original countries. Probably French, German and English will be the official languages while the rest of the languages will be more like dialects.

No matter how the languages will develop it is affected by what society will look like.