310
Tower of BaBel
at the beginning of this
Bible story, everyone spoke
the same language. But
when people tried to build
a tower to reach Heaven,
God became angry. He
made many languages so
that people could not
understand and help
one another.Languages
laTin
for many centuries, educated
people of many nationalities spoke
latin as well as their native, or first,
language. Throughout europe,
scholars, governments, and the
Church used latin.Common lanGuaGes
a map of national languages shows how
european nations have spread around the
world: for example, english settlers took their
language to the united states, Canada, australia,
and new Zealand. spain conquered much of south
america, and spanish is still spoken there. But many
people using these languages also have their own
local language, which is part of their native culture.English is spoken
worldwide by more
than one billion
people, many
as a second
or third
language.More than half of
China’s 1.3 billion
population speak
Mandarin Chinese.Sign language
Human speech and
hearing make language
possible. People who have
difficulty speaking or
hearing cannot use a
spoken language. instead,
they communicate using
hand signals. There are
signs and gestures for all
the common words, and
signs for individual letters.THe aBiliTY To TalK is one of the skills that makes humans different
from the rest of the animal world. although some animals communicate
with gestures, such as mating displays, human speech is much more highly
developed. in english, for example, most people use a vocabulary (a list of
words) of about 5,000 words in talking, and 10,000 in writing. a language
is a way of organizing spoken sounds to express ideas. Human language
developed over thousands of years, and people in different countries use
different languages. some languages share words with the languages of
nearby countries. for instance, book is libro in both italian and spanish,
and livre in french; in english we get the word library from the same
source. There are now some 7,100 different languages
and many dialects—local versions of major languages.There are about 800
languages in Papua
New Guinea.There are
at least 780
languages in India.
Hindi and English
are the official
languages.OtherArabicPortugueseFrenchSpanishRussianEnglishMandarin ChineseSome people have no difficulty in
learning foreign languages and
can speak several fluently.France once
ruled many
countries in
West Africa, and
people there still
speak French as
well as their local
languages.Find out more
alphabets
movies
writers and poetss P e a K
US_310_Languages.indd 310 09/02/16 3:56 pm