Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch. It originated from seventeenth-century Dutch dialects. 90-95% of Afrikaans consists of word of Dutch origin, supplemented by Portuguese, French, Malay, Bantu, Khoisan, and English influences.

Arabic is the umbrella term for a large number of dialects and varieties. Through Modern Standard Arabic, the inhabitants of different Arabic countries can communicate with each other.

Armenian is not related to any living language. The history of written Armenian begins with the invention of the Armenian alphabet around the year 405.

Basque is one of the few non-Indo-European languages in Europe. It is also Europe’s only isolated language (isolate).

Throughout its history, Bosnian has been written in the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabet. The language is related to Serbian and Croatian.

Breton is the only surviving Celtic language that is still spoken in mainland Europe. It is mostly related to Welsh and Cornish in Great Britain.

Bulgarian is an Indo-European language that belongs to the group of South Slavic languages. It is spoken by approximately 12 million speakers and is written in the Cyrillic script.

The French that is spoken in Canada has undergone little change since the time of the colonists, which means it is very different from the French spoken in France.

Catalan is spoken outside Spain in the mountain state of Andorra, in and around the Southern French Roussillon, and… in Alghero on the Italian island of Sardinia.

Chinese (Standard Mandarin) is called a macro language. It has about 12,000 Hanzi (characters) and is spoken and understood by approximately 1.2 billion people worldwide.

Croatian is one of the standard versions of Serbo-Croatian, and the native language of 5.5 million Croatians in Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.

Czech is a West Slavic language with approximately 12 million speakers. Czech is written in the Latin alphabet with the addition of a large number of letters, including the unique Ů.

Due to the island structure with its isolated village communities, a wide variety of Danish dialects has developed over the years.

Dari belongs to the West Iran branch of the Indo-European languages. It is one of the three dialects of Persian. The language is written from right to left, but its numbers are written from left to right.

If we add all people who speak Dutch worldwide, the total is around 28 million people. If we also include derived languages such as Afrikaans, the total number of speakers comes down to 44 million.

The United States has no official language! This was a conscious choice when drafting the Constitution to take different groups of immigrants into account. And so it remains to this day.

English is the most widely used communication language in the world. Like Frisian, Low German, and Dutch, it belongs to the West Germanic languages.

This easy-to-learn, fully regular artificial language was designed to enable people all over the world to communicate with each other. Esperanto is spoken by 2 million people.

Together with Finnish and Sami, Estonian belongs to the Finno-Ugrian language family. With its 1 million speakers, it is one of the smallest European languages.

Farsi is one of the oldest written languages in the world, with writings that date back to the 6th century B.C. Farsi’s vocabulary has been strongly influenced by Arabic throughout the centuries.

Finnish is closely related to Estonian and Karelian (a dialect spoken in Russia), and… Hungarian. Finns and Estonians can understand each other reasonably well, but Hungarian is absolutely incomprehensible to them.

Approximately 6.5 million people speak Flemish, and although the Dutch and Flemish can understand each other well, there are notable differences. Plenty of reason to use Flemish translators for the Flemish language area.

After Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic, French is the sixth largest language in the world. This is partly due to the strong population growth in the African countries where it is spoken.

Outside Friesland, Frisian is spoken in parts of Groningen and some enclaves in Germany. In total, approximately 700,000 people speak Frisian.

Scottish Gaelic has no words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and it is also missing the verb ‘to have’. Despite its small number of letters (17) and irregular verbs (10), it is not an easy language to learn.

With its 120 million native speakers, German is the largest language of Western Europe. At least 80 million others, mainly Europeans, speak it as a second language.

Within Europe, Greek is the language with the oldest writings. Moreover, it is more than just one of the classical languages; if you want to know something about Western civilisation, learning the Greek language is a good idea.

Classical Hebrew fell into disuse as a spoken language around the year 0. In the 19th century, it was revived as a new version to be developed into the official language of Israel.

Hindi is a standardised version of Hindustani. It is spoken as a native language by 425 million people. Another 120 million speak it as a second language. This makes it one of the world languages.

Despite its 44 letters and a record number of 21 cases, this language related to Finnish is not extremely difficult to learn. Finns and Hungarians do not understand each other’s languages at all, though.

The Icelandic of today is the Old Norse that was brought there by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago. It has hardly changed over the centuries. Icelanders can read Old Norse, something Norwegians cannot do without extensive studies.

Some 1,000 languages are spoken in the Indonesian Archipelago. Indonesian, which was developed from Malay, serves as its common communication language.

Italy is rich in very diverse dialects. Without Standard Italian, many Italians would not be able to understand each other.

Japanese, the official language of Japan, is spoken by approximately 127 million people. Relationships to other languages have never been demonstrated.

The Korean alphabet (Hangul) was introduced in the year 1443. The language itself has no direct relationships to other languages. Korean is spoken by 78 million people.

Latvian belongs to the Indo-European language group and is one of its two surviving Baltic languages. It has barely changed over thousands of years.

Lithuanian is a Baltic language that is known as the most archaic of the surviving Indo-European languages.

Luxembourgish became a recognised language in 1984. After German and French, it is the third official language of Luxembourg.

Malay is the official language of Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Together with the similar Indonesian, it also functions as the trade language throughout the region.

Standard Norwegian is based on the Norwegian that is spoken in and around the Norwegian capital of Oslo. Norwegian has two written languages: Bokmål (literally ‘book language’) and Nynorsk.

Papiamento is spoken on Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, in a small community on the Paraguaná Peninsula in Venezuela, and by the Antilleans living in the Netherlands. The language is mostly based on Portuguese Creole languages, Dutch, Spanish, Indian (Aruac and Carib), and English.

Polish is a West Slavic language that is spoken by approximately 40 million people. For a large country with so many speakers, there are surprisingly few dialects.

Of course, the 10 million inhabitants of Portugal speak Portuguese, but another 250 million people use it worldwide, of which 200 million are native speakers.

Unlike the Slavic languages of the surrounding Balkan countries, Romanian is a Romance language. There is a direct relationship between Romanian and Italian, Spanish, and French.

Russian is spoken in across an enormous area. All the more remarkable is that the differences between Russian dialects are small. For instance, people with different dialects within the small country of the Netherlands have more trouble understanding each other than Russians who speak different dialects.

Serbian is a Serbo-Croatian language with 10 million native speakers. In contrast with the closely related Croatian and Bosnian, Serbian is generally written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Slovak is a West Slavic language that uses the Latin alphabet. To properly represent all sounds, the alphabet was expanded to no less than 46 letters.

Slovene is a Slavic language that is spoken by over 2 million people. Sizeable groups of Slovenians who are keeping their language alive can also be found in Italy, Austria, and Hungary.

Spanish is the native language of 400 million people, and another 200 million speak it as a second language. In terms of native speakers, it is the second language of the world, exceeded only by Mandarin. However, both are bested by English when it comes to people who speak it as a second language.

Swedish is spoken by 9 million people. A characteristic element of Swedish is that it is a tonal language. A word can change meaning if it is pronounced in a different way.

With writings over 2,500 years old, Tamil is one of the oldest surviving classical languages in the world. What is also remarkable is that Tamil has barely undergone any change throughout the centuries.

Thai is a tonal language that is pronounced with five tone accents (ascending, descending, high, low, and neutral). If a word has multiple meanings, the pitch determines which meaning applies.

Turkish belongs to the group of Turkish languages that fall under the Altaic languages. It is the native language of approximately 80 million Turks in Turkey. It is also spoken in many Turkish communities in other countries.

Ukrainian belongs to the East Slavic language group and is spoken by 40 million people. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Vietnamese is spoken as a native language by about 70 million people. Nowadays, Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, but for years, the Latin and Chinese scripts were used alongside each other.