5-1 Language Matters

Part One

1. Which language is spoken by most people as their first language or mother tongue?
2. How many languages are there in the world today?
3. Two hundred years ago was the number of languages...
   • more?
   • the same?
   • fewer?
4. The largest number of books translated from English into other languages are in the subject area of...
   • Philosophy & humanities
   • Applied science
   • Literature
5. Which author's work is most often translated into other languages?

Part Two

Index Translationum Information

The Index Translationum is UNESCO's database of book translations. Books have been translated for thousands of years, with no central record of the fact. The League of Nations established a record of translations in 1932. In 1946, the United Nations superseded the League and UNESCO was assigned the Index. In 1979, the records were computerized.

Since the Index counts translations of individual books, authors with many books with few translations can rank higher than authors with a few books with more translations. So, for example, while the Bible is the single most translated book in the world, it does not rank in the top ten of the Index. The Index counts the Walt Disney Company, employing many writers, as a single writer. Authors with similar names are sometimes included as one entry, for example, the ranking for "Hergé" applies not only to the author of Tintin (Hergé), but also to B.R. Hergehahn, Elisabeth Herget, and Douglas Hergert. Hence, the top authors. as the Index presents them, are from a database query whose results require interpretation.

Most Translated According to the Index

• Updated as of May, 2011:
• Agatha Christie
• Jules Verne
• William Shakespeare
• Vladimir Lenin
• Enid Blyton
• Barbara Cartland
• Danielle Steel
• Hans Christian Andersen
• Stephen King
• Jacob Grimm

How many languages are there?

• It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just a single speaker!
• Languages are grouped into families that share a common ancestry. For example, English is related to German and Dutch, and they are all part of the Indo-European family of languages. These also include Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin.
• 2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has a mere 260.
• Nearly every language uses a similar grammatical structure, even though they may not be linked in vocabulary or origin. Communities which are usually isolated from each other because of mountainous geography may have developed multiple languages. Papua New Guinea for instance, boasts no less than 832 different languages!

What are the world's most spoken languages?

The world's most widely spoken languages by number of native speakers and as a second language, according to figures from UNESCO (The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French.

Artificial Languages

• Around 200 artificial languages have been created since the 17th century. The first were invented by scholars for communication among philosophers. Later ones were developed by less scholarly men for trade, commerce and international communication. They include 'Interlingua'(a mixture of Latin and Romance with Chinese-like sentence structure),'Ido', 'Tutonish' (a simplified blend of Anglo-Saxon English and German) and the more commonly-known 'Esperanto', invented by Ludwig Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Poland, in 1887.
• Esperanto is a spoken and written blend of Latin, English, German and Romance elements and literally means "one who hopes". Today, Esperanto is widely spoken by approximately 2 million people across the world.

The Best Way to Learn a Language

The first language you learn, your mother tongue, usually comes with little conscious effort. If you're lucky, you might even acquire more than one language in the so-called 'critical period' of language learning, believed to end sometime between ages 4-12. After that, it doesn’t come so easy, as you might have found out at school.

Something that might help is finding out about your learning style: are you a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner?

• The visual learner might benefit from writing down words and phrases over and over again.
• The auditory learner could gain from reading out loud or recording their own vocabulary lists and listen back to them.
• The kinaesthetic learner may enjoy learning in a group or using flash cards or anything else that satisfies their hunger for 'experience'.
• Finding what works for you could speed up your language acquisition - or at least make it more enjoyable!