Why learn German, you may ask? Please read on …
There are about 7,000 languages worldwide. Many languages are threatened by extinction, especially languages spoken by natives in Asia and America.
Some languages are spoken by only a couple of people. More than 50% of languages have less than 10,000 speakers; more than 25% have less than 1,000 speakers. 4% of the world population speaks 96% of all languages. From a different angle: 96% of the world population speaks 4% of all languages. People should easily be able to communicate, but they cannot because 4% represents 270 languages.
Eight languages are so-called world languages with more than 150 million speakers each. They are Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bangla and Russian.
German, Latin, Slavic and Greek are all Indo-European languages. It is thought that all languages originated from one language over 100,000 years ago.
Approximately 150 languages are spoken in Europe, of which 40 are spoken in the Caucasus region alone.
Most languages are spoken in Africa and Asia. Top of the chart is Papua New Guinea with 820 languages.
Only ⅓ of all languages have writing. Most languages are solely spoken.
There were 9000 languages in 1000 B.C. Today we are left with 7,000 languages. The number of languages is in decline. Dominating countries are the cause, as is the wish to communicate in a globalised world.
If I have done my homework correctly, I can confidently say that 1.571% of the world’s population speaks German. You may wonder if there is any need to learn German. Yes, because that percentage represents over 110 million people, most of whom live in Europe.