Ainu. Gravely in danger, and almost certainly dying, is the language of Ainu – spoken by only a few people in Japan. This Asian language is believed to be used by only a handful of people, namely ten, who are elderly and belong to the community of the Ainu people.
Since 1950, the number of unique languages spoken throughout our world has steadily declined. Today, the voices of more than 7,000 languages resound across our planet every moment, but about 2,900 or 41% are endangered.
The Ainu language of the indigenous Ainu people of northern Japan is currently moribund, identified by Japanese scholars as a "dying language" since the 1920s. A 2006 survey of the Hokkaido Ainu indicated that only 4.6% of Ainu surveyed were able to converse in or "speak a little" Ainu.
English is still the number one most spoken language around the world with about 370 million native speakers and almost 1 billion second-language speakers. It is still the most international language and it is the language of the Internet, business, and science. To be blunt, English is far from dying.
Ancient languages: the oldest dead languages on Earth
The archaeological proof we have today allows us to state that the oldest dead language in the world is the Sumerian language. Dating back to at least 3500 BC, the oldest proof of written Sumerian was found in today's Iraq on an artifact known as the Kish Tablet.
Most languages, though, die out gradually as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then begin to lose proficiency in their traditional languages. This often happens when speakers seek to learn a more-prestigious language in order to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination.
One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?
The American studies, philosophy and music expert at Columbia University, predicts that 90 per cent of languages will die out to leave around 600.
Currently, there are 573 known extinct languages. These are languages that are no longer spoken or studied. Many were local dialects with no records of their alphabet or wording, and so are forever lost. Others were major languages of their time, but society and changing cultures left them behind.
Kawishana. Spoken near the Japura River in Brazil, Kawishana (Kaixana) was once a popular language utilized by many. The numbers began dwindling, eventually dropping down to 200. Now, there remains only one documented person still able to speak the language.
Njerep is the rarest language that has been declared extinct by experts.
What is the first language? Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.
According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
To conclude, we can say that 1) Spanish grammar is more complicated to learn than English grammar (if your mother tongue is not a Romance language) and 2) the pronunciation and spelling in English are more complex than in Spanish.
They found Japanese and Spanish, often described as “fast languages,” clocked the greatest number of syllables per second. The “slowest” language in the set was Mandarin, followed closely by German.
As David Graddol notes in “The Future of English?”, there is no reason to believe that another language will become the global lingua franca within the next 50 years. English probably won't replace other languages, but its usefulness as the common language in trade, diplomacy, and pop culture will continue.
Could this eventually happen? Yes, sure! Especially if the world changes dramatically. But for the foreseeable future, it seems unlikely that another language will spread like a growing wave that eventually topples English, simply because English is already widely in use, with no new major geography to cover.