- At this moment at least 2 796 separate languages are being spoken on our planet, and that there may well be, in remote forests and jungles, other languages that have not yet been discovered…
- In addition to the languages spoken today, there exist 7000 to 8000 dialects. A dialect is generally considered to be a variant of a language sufficiently different from the parent tongue in pronunciation, vocabulary, or idiom to cause some difficulty in comprehension.
- Among the several thousand world languages, only 101 count over I million speakers. Of these, the fourteen most important in number of speakers are, in approximate order:
- Chinese
- English
- Hindustani (the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Japanese
- German
- Indonesian
- Portuguese
- French
- Arabic
- Bengali
- Malay
- Italian
- The English "goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with you."
