Language
260
Around 4,000 characters
are used in everyday
written ChineseWritten French
has five accent
marks to indicate
pronunciationThe Hebrew
alphabet uses 22
characters, written
from right to leftPortuguese
writing has 26
letters and five
accent signsIn this Hindi script, symbols
are joined together by a
horizontal barArtists may use calligraphy
(decorative writing)
to write Arabic text in
Islamic manuscripts Japanese writing is
often printed vertically(^1) Chinese 1.3 billion people
are native speakers of one of
the family of Chinese languages.
Some 880 million people
communicate in Mandarin Chinese,
a group of dialects (language
variations) from northern and
southwestern China.
(^2) French Spoken by 220 million
people worldwide, French is an
official language of the United
Nations. It is one of the family
of Romance languages, which
developed from Latin.
(^3) Hebrew The holy language of
the Jewish faith, Hebrew is spoken
by 9 million people around the
world. Many religious texts are
written in an ancient form of
Hebrew, in use from the 12th
to the 6th century bce.
(^4) Arabic Some 300 million
people communicate with a
dialect of Arabic, a family of very
old languages closely related to
Hebrew. The Qu’ran, the holy
book of the Islamic faith,
is written in Arabic.
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People communicate through language, whether the words are
spoken or written down. Today, there are some 7,000 different
languages spoken around the globe. Many more languages
were spoken in the past, which have now been forgotten. The
languages of the most powerful economic and political nations
are spoken by millions of people.
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