Let’s start this post with some numbers. According to Unesco there are more than 6500 languages spoken today.. In a world with more than 7 billion people, the amount of languages might indeed be overwhelming.
Theoretically, if we were to investigate the number of speakers for each language, we would simply take out the calculator, do a simple division and end up very surprised by the result. We would find that for each million of people on this planet, the language spoken is different.
In practice, however, this action would of course make no sense… As we all know: the repartition of languages is very unequal due to many reasons. To fully understand human languages, it would be far more interesting to analyse where these languages stem from, what they have in common, and why languages with the same origins divided and became two (or more) different languages. This video (see below) will reveal more than one secret about these questions, and after watching the video you may finally understand that:
“A foreign language may not be as foreign as you think!”
By Helene Aguirre Mindeguia, student of the MA Learning & Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Context (University Luxembourg) – Study visitor at TermCoord