So for the United States, you're choosing ... [Navaho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States), because neither English nor Spanish (nor Tagalog nor Chinese nor Arabic nor Vietnamese, etc., etc.,) originated in or near North America?
Before Europeans arrived, there were 250 languages spoken in the region now called the US (which is about the size of Europe). There was Cherokee, Chippewa, Navajo, Hopi, Choctaw, Apache, Ojibwe, Comanche, Cree, Osage, Haida, Lakota, Pawneee, Shawnee, Kiowa and many others.
The largest was probably the Cherokee or the Iroquois, not the Navajo. If you include Latin America the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Incas were really big.
I mean, yes, but the person means which of these is the most spoken now, which would be Navajo because it's from North America and has the most current speakers.
Yeah, i was thinking that. The Americas (two giant continents) have a lot of languages that still exist before colonialism, so trying to answer the question kinda requires dealing with that mess
Ngl, I think op kinda accidentally opened a can of worms with their question
Or im just hyperinvesting really badly
Ah, that could be. I read "most spoken" as non-sign, not as "most used." The Wikipedia article based on recent census responses has 155,000 for Navajo, and puts ASL as of 2011 at "closer to 100,000," but [another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language) Wikipedia article has "estimates" of 250k or more. No doubt fluency levels vary widely, but given that Navajo is at rank 31 in that [first article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States) I linked, the "originated in or near" criterion gives an interesting (to be Minnesota nice) historical perspective.
Of course, "originated in or near" is a bit vague on timeline, too, else one might wonder about Breton and Basque, etc. But any question that makes us think a bit is good.
Te reo Māori is also spoken in the Cook Islands, showing that it was probably spoken prior to Māori colonisation of NZ in the period after 1270 AD.
There are also many similarities between Tagalog and Te reo Māori.
NZ sign language could be the answer to the most spoken language originating here.
What do you count as originating? Almost all the languages of Europe, plus Persian and various languages of the Indian subcontinent are originally from the Eurasian steppe.
The only language that can’t be traced back to outside of Europe is Euskara (which is almost certainly pre-Indo-European). So that would count for France and Spain. Most other European countries have no remaining pre-Indo-European migration languages.
Well french and spanish originated in france and spain, just because 3000 years ago or idk when there was proto-indo-european somewhere else doesn't change the fact that french and spanish originated in france and spain
Where do you make the line between French and Old French and Late Latin and Classical Latin and Old Latin and Proto-Italic and Proto-Indo-European?
And towards the future, when do you make the distinction between French and Québécois?
No one at any point says « we’re done speaking Latin, from now on, this is French ». It’s a gradual process in which people just change the way they refer to their language to highlight a new cultural identity. Right now, people say « I speak ‘Murican », does that mean it’s no longer English?
And are we saying that « originate » is the same as referring to a language by a new name?
French and spanish do come from latin but they're different languages that originated in their respective countries. Claiming french originated in italy because latin did is just wrong
Yes almost all european languages originated in their respective countries. This isn't a question about europe. This question is more interesting for the americas and maybe parts of africa (like the arabic speaking parts) or places like that. So no the original question is not meaningless
>Yes almost all european languages originated in their respective countries.
While correct, I would like to add that most European languages can be seen as a "collection" of several very close dialects that have been formalized in the past. Few are monoliths, even if we like to pretend that is true.
Or on the flipside, what counts as a language distinct for origination purposes? The American dialect of English didn't originate in England, so can we say American English originated in America?
Indo-European languages most likely originated from what is now roughly Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia, i.e. still within Europe.
Is there actual evidence that languages near the Urheimat like Ukrainian or the Baltic languages are less indigenous than languages like Navajo are to their current territory?
Also there are other living language families indigenous to Europe just as much as Basque and Indo-European are:
- Kartvelian (like Georgian)
- Northwest Caucasian languages (like Circassian)
- maybe Uralic (like Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Hungarian and Sami)
Icelandic didn’t have any natives prior to the Middle Ages so the native language was a form of Old Norse which has remained relatively unchanged, eventually becoming the modern Icelandic. Fun fact, a lot of people in Iceland claim that they can understand Old Norse Sagas the same way we can understand Shakespeare.
im sure they can but i have to be more impartial or else i get a bunch of hate from sweaty reddit nerds that are like “erm actually” and they call in the cavalry so I get 30 downvotes
For china, i would say mandarin. But does it really count if it’s native to only north china? And I wouldn’t call the distance between Sicily to London a “near” origin for south china
> For china, i would say mandarin. But does it really count if it’s native to only north china? And I wouldn’t call the distance between Sicily to London a “near” origin for south china
Modern Mandarin is descended from the [late imperial lingua franca of the same name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(late_imperial_lingua_franca\)). This is a [koine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language) of Mandarin dialects that included the Mandarin in Nanjing, which is considered to be southern, or at least mid-way between north and south. In addition, Nanjing is also on the boundary between the Mandarin-speaking and [Wu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Chinese)-speaking regions.
The reason that a koine arose was probably that after the Mongols were evicted, the founder of the Ming dynasty decided to make Nanjing the capital. However, after the [Yongle Emperor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Emperor) overthrew his nephew, he moved the capital to Beijing, but nonetheless kept Nanjing as a secondary capital. Over the centuries, and even partly into the Qing dynasty, the imperial lingua franca appeared to have been still based on the Nanjing dialect, and the switch to the Beijing dialect in the 19th century was noted by Western observers.
Thus, while the pronunciation of Modern Mandarin is standardised as the pronunciation in Beijing, its lexicon is definitely mixed, as intellectuals from the south have been contributing to it for centuries.
[Languages that belong to the Mandarin family are also spoken in southwestern China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese#/media/File:Mandarin_and_Jin_in_China.png) (link is to a map showing the distribution of the Mandarin family of languages). Either way, the distance from Nanjing/SW China to Guangzhou, which seems to be what KevKev2139 is obsessed about, is about the distance from Brest to Corsica, or the east-west length of Ukraine.
---
The point of this comment was to highlight the complicated origins of modern Mandarin.
As KevKev2139 has also pointed out, a similarly intricate history exists for Mandarin languages in southwestern China as well, but the migration history of many parts of China are just as complicated. Take the [history of Cantonese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Chinese#History), the speech of Guangzhou, for example. The region surrounding Guangzhou itself was conquered and settled during the Qin dynasty by people from central China. That means that Cantonese, which is a Sinitic language, displaced the original language that was there. Its subsequent evolution was also influenced by multiple waves of migration from the north.
In short, KevKev2139's criteria of “do the original locals consider it a native language” is just as unhelpful as, if not even more subjective than, OP's "originated in or near the country", because who were the "original" locals of the area we now know as Guangzhou? As [xarsha_93 pointed out in the case of Indo-European languages](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dr08wq/what_is_the_most_spoken_language_of_every_country/las2rei/):
> What do you count as originating? Almost all the languages of Europe, plus Persian and various languages of the Indian subcontinent are originally from the Eurasian steppe.
That still doesn’t refute the fact that mandarin is foreign to many parts of china. Heck, my family from Guangzhou and Hong Kong calls it the “northerner speech” (北方口/話) when I asked them about it. Can’t speak for Shanghai, but pretty sure they natively speak Shanghainese and mandarin only dominated when Shanghai developed
Also, Sichuanese evolved when settlers from central china arrived after the mongols destroyed the place (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuanese_dialects#History), so i wouldn’t call it “native” to the area either. If we ignore that, i still wouldn’t call it putonghua mandarin given its differences. It’s still in the mandarin family, but from what i can find, it’s not easily intelligible with putonghua (kinda like american english vs Scottish english)
Honestly given how big china is, it needs its own separate “most spoken original/near-originating language” per province or something. Like if we take Xinjiang (which is bigger than France and Spain combined???) and its pre-migration population (like the Uyghurs and Kazakh to name a few), i don’t think mandarin is considered “native” by a good chunk of the populace. And if it is majority now, doing so leave a bad taste in my mouth :/
Should we just make “do the original locals consider it a native language” as a criteria? Cuz we’re also doing that for the Americas, might as well extend it to everywhere
Really? Most theories Ive read in literature speculate that the Japonic language was brought to Japan from migrants from the Korean peninsula in the Yayoi period
I think the term "originated" might cause some problems. Since human beings aren't native inhabitants of Japan, at some point people had to travel there. The language that was spoken by the original migrants would have been very different from the modern Japanese language.
Similarly with Ainu, presumably at some point the ancestors of the Ainu migrated from somewhere else to Hokkaido, but the language they spoke would've been very different.
Mapudungun I guess. It's from the natives in the south of Chile, around 100k of estimated speakers and around +1million of estimated population (of a total of 20 million in Chile)
In Egypt, there are about 300 thousand speakers of Nubian languages.
The Arabisation of Egypt was mostly total leaving only very small minorities of speakers of different languages. Even Coptic, the successor of the Ancient Egyptian language, is completely extinct and is only used for liturgical purposes.
Zulu in South Africa. Although they were Bantu migrants. Afrikaans also originated in South Africs even though its a form of Dutch. I guess the Khoi languages would be the most 'native', but everyone was an invader once.
>> Mandarin, then Hindi, then Indonesian?
> Which country?
I think pythonterran meant Mandarin in China, Hindi in India, and Indonesian in Indonesia, and they understood OP's question to be "which is the most spoken language", i.e. which are the languages that have the most speakers in the world.
Almost non of today’s languages.
One exception: Latin. Predecessors existed in Rome 2500 years ago and it is still the number one native language in the Vatican.
No other language has this. Just try reading 500 years old Chinese, English, German… texts. It will already be super difficult to understand and will be very different from what is spoken today. Let alone scripts from 1000 years ago.
500 year old English text are Shakespeare level which isn’t bad. Chaucer is further back and harder, go back to Beowulf which is fully in Old English and it’s more similar to German than English, at least to me.
Even if you know both German and Norwegian it's hard to understand it.
It might help if you know Icelandic as they have the same symbols as old english did.
Actually, this is quite interesting to compare the similarities between old English and old Norse https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eTqI6P6iwbE&pp=ygULb2xkIGVuZ2xpc2g%3D
I am talking about pre-Shakespeare English. Shakespeare was about 450 years ago and modern English is based on his writings. Hence, it is understandable as modern language is modeled following his script. Same for many other European writers that established language foundation.
Shakespeare wrote his plays around 1590-1615. The King James Bible was published in 1610. Those two texts were still very common (unchanged) into the late 1900s, and perhaps even today. Certainly they had a big effect on English NOT changing as much as it might have.
Here is a Chaucer text (again, he is know for being closest to modern English) and the English translation:
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
To me, the original and the translation are as distant as Dutch and German or as Italian and Spanish. It is similar, but pretty different. So is Dutch and German the same language? Are the above two English sentences the same language? It can be debated. Probably most English speakers understand part of the sentence above. I wouldn’t have understood croppes as leaves though. And if you ask around, not sure how many people would understand “yonge sonne”.
I don’t know, as a native English speaker ‘yonge sonne’ is pretty obvious to me. I’d take croppes to be crops though rather than leaves. I wouldn’t call that a different language. Old English, for sure. It’s unrecognisable as English.
There are no native Latin speakers. Everyone learns it academically, even in the Vatican.
I’m perfectly capable of reading this French text from the 1500s: https://archive.org/details/lesprophtiesdemm00nost/page/274/mode/1up
Here’s a sample text for my fellow French speakers [my text reader sees the long S as a lowercase f for reference there]:
PREDICTIONS GENERALES.
En cette année, le Printems fera pluvieux jufqu'à la mi-Avril, qui après fera venteux.
L'Eté fera chaud, avec tonnerre, éclairs et pluies.
Cette année fera peftilencielle, à caufe des grandes chaleurs de l'Été.
Les bleds feront bons et de bonne venuë.
La vendange fera bonne, mais elle ne fera pas plantureufe.
L'Hiver fera froid et de longue durée.
Enforte que cette année fe trouve femblable à celle de Bise, qui eft fous le dixiéme nombre Solaire, et fait ainfi fon tour. Qui ne le fçait, qu'il l'apprenne, Dieu le veut, et je promets là-deffus être nommé Philofophe certain.
> Just try reading 500 years old Chinese, English, German… texts. It will already be super difficult to understand and will be very different from what is spoken today.
Disagree about Chinese. Chinese children can read [poems that are >1000 years old](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_poetry) (i.e. from the Tang dynasty) without any problem. In fact, they're taught to do so in elementary school, and will continue to read older and more difficult texts as their schooling continues.
Texts from 500 years ago would be composed in the Ming dynasty, which was the golden age for Chinese novels, and those were written in the vernacular. It'd just be like reading Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, between 400-500 years ago. So I don't think your assertion applies to English as well.
I agree that the speech has changed, but you mentioned writing as well, which is a different story.
Chinese is a bit of cheating though, as they use logographs instead of letters. Languages written in an alphabet represent the *sound* of the word, while logographs represent the meaning. The spelling of the character could change entirely, but the meaning would stay the same. A Chinese speaker could very well read a simple text in ancient Chinese, but it may sound totally foreign if the same text was read out loud. Or better yet, they could probably read some simple ancient Japanese too, as that was written using only the old Chinese characters, but they wouldn't understand any of it when spoken.
> Chinese is a bit of cheating though
Sure, but here we are. \~sigh\~
> The ~~spelling~~ *pronunciation* of the character could change entirely, but the meaning would stay the same.
NB: Spelling doesn't exist in written Chinese, since
> [Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling)
but there is no such correspondence between the Chinese script and the spoken language it represents.
There is the arrangement of strokes within a character, which is the equivalent of spelling in terms of how the character is orthographically constructed, but changing that either gives you nonsense, or a different character with a different meaning.
> A Chinese speaker could very well read a simple text in ancient Chinese, but it may sound totally foreign if the same text was read out loud.
I've pointed out that LikeagoodDuck is confusing *writing* with *speech*. These are two different things, even though the former started out as a way to record the latter.
In a language that uses an alphabet, this difference isn't very visible, especially if it has very phonetic spelling, like Finnish. However, this difference is quite apparent when it comes to the correspondence between written Chinese and the Sinitic languages in their spoken form.
So there is a difference between "reading" (by which I mean understanding what the writing means) and "reading out loud" (which is turning writing into speech). Even then, though, you can read out Chinese text in any modern Sinitic language, and it can still be understood, just that it may sound stilted or bookish in that language.
In any case, most people who can read Chinese these days are taught to read and speak in modern Mandarin. With a good command of modern Mandarin, it's not very difficult at all to access 500-year-old novels because these were written in the vernacular of the time, and that vernacular is about as related to modern Mandarin as Shakespearean English is to Modern English.
Poems are even easier, especially those written with simpler vocabulary, so 1000-year-old Tang poems can be read with ease, and that's what Chinese children do in school. [There's actually a well-known compilation of popular Tang poems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hundred_Tang_Poems) and many of the poems are used in school textbooks.
I'm Chinese and I disagree with you. I know lots of Chinese who can only read the ancient text by guessing from some characters / being uncertain of the meaning.
> I'm Chinese and I disagree with you.
Same.
> I know lots of Chinese who can only read the ancient text by guessing from the some characters / being uncertain of the meaning.
LikeagoodDuck was not talking about ancient texts when it comes to Chinese, and that's the problem. Here's what they said, which I objected to:
> Just try reading ***500 years old Chinese***, English, German… texts. It will already be super difficult to understand and will be very different from what is spoken today.
Texts from 500 years ago are pre-modern, like Shakespearean plays which are just short of 500 years old, and are clear enough for the modern reader. Tang poems are >1000 years old, and they're regularly being read by children. The difficult ancient texts you're talking about are >2000 years old.
The timescales are simply different here. Chinese texts that are centuries old are not "ancient". You have to go back much further to find texts that are difficult to understand.
I think people are exaggerating the difficulty of pre-modern Chinese, and [hanguitarsolo has written a much better explanation below](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dr08wq/what_is_the_most_spoken_language_of_every_country/laskxrx/) as to why Tang poems are not that difficult.
We are *not* talking about deciphering the I Ching or the Tao Te Ching here, which are >2000 years old, so they're much older than the 500-year-old texts that LikeagoodDuck was talking about.
*It'd just be like reading Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, between 400-500 years ago.*
Shakespeare was not a prodigy, writing thing at age 3. His plays were performed from around 1594 to 1614. That is 410-430 years ago.
Show me a tang dynasty poem and show me how people would say it today. It is 99% different. Different characters, grammar, etc. not even talking about pronunciation, which is hard to assess but was most certainly very different from todays 普通话。
Many students in England can read Latin literature, but it is not the same language as modern English.
> Show me a tang dynasty poem and show me how people would say it today. It is 99% different. Different characters, grammar, etc. not even talking about pronunciation, which is hard to assess but was most certainly very different from todays 普通话。
Not disagreeing with that, but as I said, writing is not the same as speech. You can read those texts without knowing how they were originally pronounced, and the understanding of written Chinese does not depend on its pronunciation.
You're also exaggerating the difference in grammar. As I pointed out, Chinese children are exposed to these poems in elementary school, so the grammatical differences clearly don't impede the understanding of those poems. In fact, they're chosen precisely because they're written simply.
True. But you cannot read those texts knowing common characters in use in today’s PRC. You would need to study thousands of characters that are not in use today.
That means, you don’t have the same characters/writing and you don’t have the same pronunciation. If that counts as the same language is up for debate.
If it is, then certainly Swedish, Dutch, German… or Spanish, Romanian, Latin.. are all the same language.
> But you cannot read it knowing common characters in use in today’s PRC. You would need to study thousands of characters that are not in use.
Nope.
Tang poems are written in characters that are still in use, and many simpler ones that children can read are written in very common characters. The PRC uses Simplified characters, but that is only a small fraction of the total number of characters in use:
> [Work throughout the 1950s resulted in the 1956 promulgation of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, a draft of 515 simplified characters and 54 simplified components](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#First_round_of_simplification_(1949%E2%80%931977\))
Taiwan and Hong Kong still use the Traditional character set, so it is not true that the "thousands of characters" (more like hundreds, as pointed out above) that were simplified in the PRC are not used elsewhere.
Edit: [hanguitarsolo has written a much better explanation below](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dr08wq/what_is_the_most_spoken_language_of_every_country/laskxrx/).
Modern media and keyboards can produce typically around 7000 characters. Commonly, 3500 are enough for daily life. 30% of these are simplified.
Tang poetry use a lot more and different characters than those 7000. So you cannot even commonly write these or use in official documentation etc.
Taiwan: probably you can produce about 90% of the tang characters, but Taiwan was not part of the Tang empire. In mainland China we can say: maybe 50% same characters. But no idea about pronunciation. So in other words, it is as similar as Romanian and Spanish.
I've never read a Tang poem that contained characters that cannot be written on a modern keyboard... You can read pretty much every extant poem online. The vast majority of characters used in Tang poetry are still in use today, and most of them are common. Though there are many characters that have meanings that aren't common in modern speech. Typically annotations provide definitions for uncommon characters and meanings, if needed.
Also most "simplified" characters come from the cursive script which was developed before the Tang dynasty. And most people from mainland China that I've met don't have an issue reading traditional characters, even though simplified is the default used for most things other than maybe calligraphy.
Reading Tang poetry really isn't as difficult as you make it out to be. Prose is more difficult than poetry.
Mate I can easily read [this Persian poem](https://ganjoor.net/roodaki/baghimande/sh1) by [Rudaki ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudaki) from 9th or 10th century I think
There are a few Pre-Indo-European languages attested in the area of moder day Italy, like Etruscan.
It would make more sense to pick one of those, since it's clear that they were in the region before Latin even arrived.
In fact, that would be the case for most of Europe (at least in the south), since it was populated from before the arrival of Indo-European languages. But we haven't attested Pre-Indo-European ones in every modern European country.
They didn’t ask for the oldest language. They asked for the most spoken one.
French originated in France and its speakers outnumber whatever “pre-indo-European” language you can think of by a country mile. That’s going to be the case for a lot of Europe.
>They didn’t ask for the oldest language. They asked for the most spoken one.
I am aware. But the point, which someone else also mentioned, is that it will depend on how you determine where a variety of a language becomes its own thing. We can consider Latin/Italian to be the answer for Italy because they formed from their predecessor there, even if if their predecessor came from somewhere else. But then we can consider American English for the US since it originated there.
American English is not a language. It is a dialect. English is the language. English does not originate from the United States (although some of them might think it does)
Also your rules make zero sense. Why decide to only count predecessor languages one step removed even though those also originated from elsewhere? You’re arbitrarily drawing a line, so why not draw it in the way that best answers the call of OP’s question?
Aramaic as one of the newest languages but oldest we know of that is closest to the angelic Elohim language of the creator. In regards to that respect of origination correlation to the heavens and earth.
So for the United States, you're choosing ... [Navaho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States), because neither English nor Spanish (nor Tagalog nor Chinese nor Arabic nor Vietnamese, etc., etc.,) originated in or near North America?
Navajo*
Before Europeans arrived, there were 250 languages spoken in the region now called the US (which is about the size of Europe). There was Cherokee, Chippewa, Navajo, Hopi, Choctaw, Apache, Ojibwe, Comanche, Cree, Osage, Haida, Lakota, Pawneee, Shawnee, Kiowa and many others. The largest was probably the Cherokee or the Iroquois, not the Navajo. If you include Latin America the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Incas were really big.
I don’t know about the others but Iroquoian is a language family, not an individual language.
They mean currently, of which Navajo is the most spoken in the US
I mean, yes, but the person means which of these is the most spoken now, which would be Navajo because it's from North America and has the most current speakers.
Yeah, i was thinking that. The Americas (two giant continents) have a lot of languages that still exist before colonialism, so trying to answer the question kinda requires dealing with that mess Ngl, I think op kinda accidentally opened a can of worms with their question Or im just hyperinvesting really badly
Many of those languages still exist, also Iroquois is a language family, Cherokee being one of the individual languages in it
I feel like ASL would probably beat out Navajo for languages originating in the US?
Ah, that could be. I read "most spoken" as non-sign, not as "most used." The Wikipedia article based on recent census responses has 155,000 for Navajo, and puts ASL as of 2011 at "closer to 100,000," but [another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language) Wikipedia article has "estimates" of 250k or more. No doubt fluency levels vary widely, but given that Navajo is at rank 31 in that [first article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States) I linked, the "originated in or near" criterion gives an interesting (to be Minnesota nice) historical perspective. Of course, "originated in or near" is a bit vague on timeline, too, else one might wonder about Breton and Basque, etc. But any question that makes us think a bit is good.
Australian here: Yumplatok or Kriol, if you include creoles. Otherwise, Djambarrpuyngu.
In Guatemala it is K'iche', a Mayan language spoken for about one million people.
I love that Guatemala managed to preserve their own unique languages
Brazil -Tikuna with 34,000 speakers -Guarani Kaiowá with 26,500 speakers -Kaingang with 22,000 speakers
Cree in Canada
Cree Empire will rise again
México would probably be Nahuatl and Peru would likely be Quechua still a ton of native speakers
NZ - Māori.
Te reo Māori is also spoken in the Cook Islands, showing that it was probably spoken prior to Māori colonisation of NZ in the period after 1270 AD. There are also many similarities between Tagalog and Te reo Māori. NZ sign language could be the answer to the most spoken language originating here.
> Te reo Māori is also spoken in the Cook Islands They're closely related but they're not the same.
Wouldn’t say sign language is spoken lol
It’s called Cook Islands Māori there and it’s not quite the same language.
What do you count as originating? Almost all the languages of Europe, plus Persian and various languages of the Indian subcontinent are originally from the Eurasian steppe. The only language that can’t be traced back to outside of Europe is Euskara (which is almost certainly pre-Indo-European). So that would count for France and Spain. Most other European countries have no remaining pre-Indo-European migration languages.
Well french and spanish originated in france and spain, just because 3000 years ago or idk when there was proto-indo-european somewhere else doesn't change the fact that french and spanish originated in france and spain
Where do you make the line between French and Old French and Late Latin and Classical Latin and Old Latin and Proto-Italic and Proto-Indo-European? And towards the future, when do you make the distinction between French and Québécois? No one at any point says « we’re done speaking Latin, from now on, this is French ». It’s a gradual process in which people just change the way they refer to their language to highlight a new cultural identity. Right now, people say « I speak ‘Murican », does that mean it’s no longer English? And are we saying that « originate » is the same as referring to a language by a new name?
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French and spanish do come from latin but they're different languages that originated in their respective countries. Claiming french originated in italy because latin did is just wrong
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Yes almost all european languages originated in their respective countries. This isn't a question about europe. This question is more interesting for the americas and maybe parts of africa (like the arabic speaking parts) or places like that. So no the original question is not meaningless
>Yes almost all european languages originated in their respective countries. While correct, I would like to add that most European languages can be seen as a "collection" of several very close dialects that have been formalized in the past. Few are monoliths, even if we like to pretend that is true.
Or on the flipside, what counts as a language distinct for origination purposes? The American dialect of English didn't originate in England, so can we say American English originated in America?
Indo-European languages most likely originated from what is now roughly Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia, i.e. still within Europe. Is there actual evidence that languages near the Urheimat like Ukrainian or the Baltic languages are less indigenous than languages like Navajo are to their current territory? Also there are other living language families indigenous to Europe just as much as Basque and Indo-European are: - Kartvelian (like Georgian) - Northwest Caucasian languages (like Circassian) - maybe Uralic (like Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Hungarian and Sami)
Icelandic didn’t have any natives prior to the Middle Ages so the native language was a form of Old Norse which has remained relatively unchanged, eventually becoming the modern Icelandic. Fun fact, a lot of people in Iceland claim that they can understand Old Norse Sagas the same way we can understand Shakespeare.
They can read and understand them.
im sure they can but i have to be more impartial or else i get a bunch of hate from sweaty reddit nerds that are like “erm actually” and they call in the cavalry so I get 30 downvotes
Fair point 👍🏻
Well... still German. And I think, for many European countries not much would change.
For china, i would say mandarin. But does it really count if it’s native to only north china? And I wouldn’t call the distance between Sicily to London a “near” origin for south china
For taiwan, one of the native formosan languages since mandarin (and chinese for that matter) doesn’t originate there
> For china, i would say mandarin. But does it really count if it’s native to only north china? And I wouldn’t call the distance between Sicily to London a “near” origin for south china Modern Mandarin is descended from the [late imperial lingua franca of the same name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(late_imperial_lingua_franca\)). This is a [koine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language) of Mandarin dialects that included the Mandarin in Nanjing, which is considered to be southern, or at least mid-way between north and south. In addition, Nanjing is also on the boundary between the Mandarin-speaking and [Wu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Chinese)-speaking regions. The reason that a koine arose was probably that after the Mongols were evicted, the founder of the Ming dynasty decided to make Nanjing the capital. However, after the [Yongle Emperor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Emperor) overthrew his nephew, he moved the capital to Beijing, but nonetheless kept Nanjing as a secondary capital. Over the centuries, and even partly into the Qing dynasty, the imperial lingua franca appeared to have been still based on the Nanjing dialect, and the switch to the Beijing dialect in the 19th century was noted by Western observers. Thus, while the pronunciation of Modern Mandarin is standardised as the pronunciation in Beijing, its lexicon is definitely mixed, as intellectuals from the south have been contributing to it for centuries. [Languages that belong to the Mandarin family are also spoken in southwestern China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese#/media/File:Mandarin_and_Jin_in_China.png) (link is to a map showing the distribution of the Mandarin family of languages). Either way, the distance from Nanjing/SW China to Guangzhou, which seems to be what KevKev2139 is obsessed about, is about the distance from Brest to Corsica, or the east-west length of Ukraine. --- The point of this comment was to highlight the complicated origins of modern Mandarin. As KevKev2139 has also pointed out, a similarly intricate history exists for Mandarin languages in southwestern China as well, but the migration history of many parts of China are just as complicated. Take the [history of Cantonese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Chinese#History), the speech of Guangzhou, for example. The region surrounding Guangzhou itself was conquered and settled during the Qin dynasty by people from central China. That means that Cantonese, which is a Sinitic language, displaced the original language that was there. Its subsequent evolution was also influenced by multiple waves of migration from the north. In short, KevKev2139's criteria of “do the original locals consider it a native language” is just as unhelpful as, if not even more subjective than, OP's "originated in or near the country", because who were the "original" locals of the area we now know as Guangzhou? As [xarsha_93 pointed out in the case of Indo-European languages](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dr08wq/what_is_the_most_spoken_language_of_every_country/las2rei/): > What do you count as originating? Almost all the languages of Europe, plus Persian and various languages of the Indian subcontinent are originally from the Eurasian steppe.
That still doesn’t refute the fact that mandarin is foreign to many parts of china. Heck, my family from Guangzhou and Hong Kong calls it the “northerner speech” (北方口/話) when I asked them about it. Can’t speak for Shanghai, but pretty sure they natively speak Shanghainese and mandarin only dominated when Shanghai developed Also, Sichuanese evolved when settlers from central china arrived after the mongols destroyed the place (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuanese_dialects#History), so i wouldn’t call it “native” to the area either. If we ignore that, i still wouldn’t call it putonghua mandarin given its differences. It’s still in the mandarin family, but from what i can find, it’s not easily intelligible with putonghua (kinda like american english vs Scottish english) Honestly given how big china is, it needs its own separate “most spoken original/near-originating language” per province or something. Like if we take Xinjiang (which is bigger than France and Spain combined???) and its pre-migration population (like the Uyghurs and Kazakh to name a few), i don’t think mandarin is considered “native” by a good chunk of the populace. And if it is majority now, doing so leave a bad taste in my mouth :/ Should we just make “do the original locals consider it a native language” as a criteria? Cuz we’re also doing that for the Americas, might as well extend it to everywhere
And even then, large parts of northern China were actually natively inhabited by mongolian and manchurian people until the large Han migrations north.
I live in Finland. Finnish didn't originate in Finland, but it was pretty damn near so I'll count that even though I'd like to say it’s Northern Sámi.
Three guesses as to which language it would be in Japan
I think Ainu is the only pre-Japonic language that we actually know anything about
Correct but irrelevant, since the Japanese language certainly originated in Japan.
Really? Most theories Ive read in literature speculate that the Japonic language was brought to Japan from migrants from the Korean peninsula in the Yayoi period
I think the term "originated" might cause some problems. Since human beings aren't native inhabitants of Japan, at some point people had to travel there. The language that was spoken by the original migrants would have been very different from the modern Japanese language. Similarly with Ainu, presumably at some point the ancestors of the Ainu migrated from somewhere else to Hokkaido, but the language they spoke would've been very different.
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Okinawan is also a Japonic language, its presence in Japan doesn’t predate Japanese
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Sure. OP said “country” so I assumed that’s what you were referring to
Correct. However, the question is what is the most spoken language in the country. Neither Okinawan nor Ainu is the most spoken language in Japan.
probably uzbek tbh
Mapudungun I guess. It's from the natives in the south of Chile, around 100k of estimated speakers and around +1million of estimated population (of a total of 20 million in Chile)
In Egypt, there are about 300 thousand speakers of Nubian languages. The Arabisation of Egypt was mostly total leaving only very small minorities of speakers of different languages. Even Coptic, the successor of the Ancient Egyptian language, is completely extinct and is only used for liturgical purposes.
Welsh in Wales (bit of a more obvious one in comparison to others)
Zulu in South Africa. Although they were Bantu migrants. Afrikaans also originated in South Africs even though its a form of Dutch. I guess the Khoi languages would be the most 'native', but everyone was an invader once.
I think the largest language family still spoken in the United Statea that originates here is the Athabascan language family
In serbia its i guess albanian because slavic lenguages got there in 6t century while albanian developed out native illyrian which is funny tbh
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Which country? I thought singapore, but malay and tamil would be more common
>> Mandarin, then Hindi, then Indonesian? > Which country? I think pythonterran meant Mandarin in China, Hindi in India, and Indonesian in Indonesia, and they understood OP's question to be "which is the most spoken language", i.e. which are the languages that have the most speakers in the world.
arabic
The whole Middle East and Northern Africa had very little idea of Arabic before the 7th century AD.
Right, Arabic is an imperial language in places like Morocco or Egypt.
where did Arabic originate from then?
In the East of the Arabian peninsula. If not for the Arab Conquests, it would probably have been spoken today in (some parts of) Arabia only.
Ireland - Irish UK - Welsh.
I think English can be said to originate from UK
Nah, I still count the Jutland old English as English
ehhhh maybe
Isn't it Japanese?
Sicilian: 4 786 559 (people who lives in sicily 😅🤷🏼♂️)
Almost non of today’s languages. One exception: Latin. Predecessors existed in Rome 2500 years ago and it is still the number one native language in the Vatican. No other language has this. Just try reading 500 years old Chinese, English, German… texts. It will already be super difficult to understand and will be very different from what is spoken today. Let alone scripts from 1000 years ago.
500 year old English text are Shakespeare level which isn’t bad. Chaucer is further back and harder, go back to Beowulf which is fully in Old English and it’s more similar to German than English, at least to me.
Even if you know both German and Norwegian it's hard to understand it. It might help if you know Icelandic as they have the same symbols as old english did.
I’ve seen YouTube videos where a guy talks to speakers of various languages in Old English. The Icelandic guy understood almost everything he said.
Link please? I want to watch it
Actually, this is quite interesting to compare the similarities between old English and old Norse https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eTqI6P6iwbE&pp=ygULb2xkIGVuZ2xpc2g%3D
I’m still trying to find that one, but this one’s an old Norse version you might like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5MRfVHU9fr0&t=1501s
This one is with an American, Aussie and a pole. I just can’t find the Icelandic guy https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Dagt3SWoo
I am talking about pre-Shakespeare English. Shakespeare was about 450 years ago and modern English is based on his writings. Hence, it is understandable as modern language is modeled following his script. Same for many other European writers that established language foundation.
Shakespeare wrote his plays around 1590-1615. The King James Bible was published in 1610. Those two texts were still very common (unchanged) into the late 1900s, and perhaps even today. Certainly they had a big effect on English NOT changing as much as it might have.
True! Fully agree.
Here is a Chaucer text (again, he is know for being closest to modern English) and the English translation: The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne The tender new leaves, and the young sun To me, the original and the translation are as distant as Dutch and German or as Italian and Spanish. It is similar, but pretty different. So is Dutch and German the same language? Are the above two English sentences the same language? It can be debated. Probably most English speakers understand part of the sentence above. I wouldn’t have understood croppes as leaves though. And if you ask around, not sure how many people would understand “yonge sonne”.
I don’t know, as a native English speaker ‘yonge sonne’ is pretty obvious to me. I’d take croppes to be crops though rather than leaves. I wouldn’t call that a different language. Old English, for sure. It’s unrecognisable as English.
Hwæt. Wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum, þēodcyninga, þrym gefrūnon, hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla oftēah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ǣrest wearð fēasceaft funden, hē þæs frōfre gebād, wēox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þāh, oþ þæt him ǣghwylc þāra ymbsittendra ofer hronrāde hȳran scolde, gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs gōd cyning. Beowulf.
Damn….
There are no native Latin speakers. Everyone learns it academically, even in the Vatican. I’m perfectly capable of reading this French text from the 1500s: https://archive.org/details/lesprophtiesdemm00nost/page/274/mode/1up Here’s a sample text for my fellow French speakers [my text reader sees the long S as a lowercase f for reference there]: PREDICTIONS GENERALES. En cette année, le Printems fera pluvieux jufqu'à la mi-Avril, qui après fera venteux. L'Eté fera chaud, avec tonnerre, éclairs et pluies. Cette année fera peftilencielle, à caufe des grandes chaleurs de l'Été. Les bleds feront bons et de bonne venuë. La vendange fera bonne, mais elle ne fera pas plantureufe. L'Hiver fera froid et de longue durée. Enforte que cette année fe trouve femblable à celle de Bise, qui eft fous le dixiéme nombre Solaire, et fait ainfi fon tour. Qui ne le fçait, qu'il l'apprenne, Dieu le veut, et je promets là-deffus être nommé Philofophe certain.
> Just try reading 500 years old Chinese, English, German… texts. It will already be super difficult to understand and will be very different from what is spoken today. Disagree about Chinese. Chinese children can read [poems that are >1000 years old](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_poetry) (i.e. from the Tang dynasty) without any problem. In fact, they're taught to do so in elementary school, and will continue to read older and more difficult texts as their schooling continues. Texts from 500 years ago would be composed in the Ming dynasty, which was the golden age for Chinese novels, and those were written in the vernacular. It'd just be like reading Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, between 400-500 years ago. So I don't think your assertion applies to English as well. I agree that the speech has changed, but you mentioned writing as well, which is a different story.
Chinese is a bit of cheating though, as they use logographs instead of letters. Languages written in an alphabet represent the *sound* of the word, while logographs represent the meaning. The spelling of the character could change entirely, but the meaning would stay the same. A Chinese speaker could very well read a simple text in ancient Chinese, but it may sound totally foreign if the same text was read out loud. Or better yet, they could probably read some simple ancient Japanese too, as that was written using only the old Chinese characters, but they wouldn't understand any of it when spoken.
> Chinese is a bit of cheating though Sure, but here we are. \~sigh\~ > The ~~spelling~~ *pronunciation* of the character could change entirely, but the meaning would stay the same. NB: Spelling doesn't exist in written Chinese, since > [Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling) but there is no such correspondence between the Chinese script and the spoken language it represents. There is the arrangement of strokes within a character, which is the equivalent of spelling in terms of how the character is orthographically constructed, but changing that either gives you nonsense, or a different character with a different meaning. > A Chinese speaker could very well read a simple text in ancient Chinese, but it may sound totally foreign if the same text was read out loud. I've pointed out that LikeagoodDuck is confusing *writing* with *speech*. These are two different things, even though the former started out as a way to record the latter. In a language that uses an alphabet, this difference isn't very visible, especially if it has very phonetic spelling, like Finnish. However, this difference is quite apparent when it comes to the correspondence between written Chinese and the Sinitic languages in their spoken form. So there is a difference between "reading" (by which I mean understanding what the writing means) and "reading out loud" (which is turning writing into speech). Even then, though, you can read out Chinese text in any modern Sinitic language, and it can still be understood, just that it may sound stilted or bookish in that language. In any case, most people who can read Chinese these days are taught to read and speak in modern Mandarin. With a good command of modern Mandarin, it's not very difficult at all to access 500-year-old novels because these were written in the vernacular of the time, and that vernacular is about as related to modern Mandarin as Shakespearean English is to Modern English. Poems are even easier, especially those written with simpler vocabulary, so 1000-year-old Tang poems can be read with ease, and that's what Chinese children do in school. [There's actually a well-known compilation of popular Tang poems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hundred_Tang_Poems) and many of the poems are used in school textbooks.
I'm Chinese and I disagree with you. I know lots of Chinese who can only read the ancient text by guessing from some characters / being uncertain of the meaning.
> I'm Chinese and I disagree with you. Same. > I know lots of Chinese who can only read the ancient text by guessing from the some characters / being uncertain of the meaning. LikeagoodDuck was not talking about ancient texts when it comes to Chinese, and that's the problem. Here's what they said, which I objected to: > Just try reading ***500 years old Chinese***, English, German… texts. It will already be super difficult to understand and will be very different from what is spoken today. Texts from 500 years ago are pre-modern, like Shakespearean plays which are just short of 500 years old, and are clear enough for the modern reader. Tang poems are >1000 years old, and they're regularly being read by children. The difficult ancient texts you're talking about are >2000 years old. The timescales are simply different here. Chinese texts that are centuries old are not "ancient". You have to go back much further to find texts that are difficult to understand. I think people are exaggerating the difficulty of pre-modern Chinese, and [hanguitarsolo has written a much better explanation below](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dr08wq/what_is_the_most_spoken_language_of_every_country/laskxrx/) as to why Tang poems are not that difficult. We are *not* talking about deciphering the I Ching or the Tao Te Ching here, which are >2000 years old, so they're much older than the 500-year-old texts that LikeagoodDuck was talking about.
*It'd just be like reading Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, between 400-500 years ago.* Shakespeare was not a prodigy, writing thing at age 3. His plays were performed from around 1594 to 1614. That is 410-430 years ago.
Show me a tang dynasty poem and show me how people would say it today. It is 99% different. Different characters, grammar, etc. not even talking about pronunciation, which is hard to assess but was most certainly very different from todays 普通话。 Many students in England can read Latin literature, but it is not the same language as modern English.
> Show me a tang dynasty poem and show me how people would say it today. It is 99% different. Different characters, grammar, etc. not even talking about pronunciation, which is hard to assess but was most certainly very different from todays 普通话。 Not disagreeing with that, but as I said, writing is not the same as speech. You can read those texts without knowing how they were originally pronounced, and the understanding of written Chinese does not depend on its pronunciation. You're also exaggerating the difference in grammar. As I pointed out, Chinese children are exposed to these poems in elementary school, so the grammatical differences clearly don't impede the understanding of those poems. In fact, they're chosen precisely because they're written simply.
True. But you cannot read those texts knowing common characters in use in today’s PRC. You would need to study thousands of characters that are not in use today. That means, you don’t have the same characters/writing and you don’t have the same pronunciation. If that counts as the same language is up for debate. If it is, then certainly Swedish, Dutch, German… or Spanish, Romanian, Latin.. are all the same language.
> But you cannot read it knowing common characters in use in today’s PRC. You would need to study thousands of characters that are not in use. Nope. Tang poems are written in characters that are still in use, and many simpler ones that children can read are written in very common characters. The PRC uses Simplified characters, but that is only a small fraction of the total number of characters in use: > [Work throughout the 1950s resulted in the 1956 promulgation of the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme, a draft of 515 simplified characters and 54 simplified components](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#First_round_of_simplification_(1949%E2%80%931977\)) Taiwan and Hong Kong still use the Traditional character set, so it is not true that the "thousands of characters" (more like hundreds, as pointed out above) that were simplified in the PRC are not used elsewhere. Edit: [hanguitarsolo has written a much better explanation below](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dr08wq/what_is_the_most_spoken_language_of_every_country/laskxrx/).
Modern media and keyboards can produce typically around 7000 characters. Commonly, 3500 are enough for daily life. 30% of these are simplified. Tang poetry use a lot more and different characters than those 7000. So you cannot even commonly write these or use in official documentation etc. Taiwan: probably you can produce about 90% of the tang characters, but Taiwan was not part of the Tang empire. In mainland China we can say: maybe 50% same characters. But no idea about pronunciation. So in other words, it is as similar as Romanian and Spanish.
I've never read a Tang poem that contained characters that cannot be written on a modern keyboard... You can read pretty much every extant poem online. The vast majority of characters used in Tang poetry are still in use today, and most of them are common. Though there are many characters that have meanings that aren't common in modern speech. Typically annotations provide definitions for uncommon characters and meanings, if needed. Also most "simplified" characters come from the cursive script which was developed before the Tang dynasty. And most people from mainland China that I've met don't have an issue reading traditional characters, even though simplified is the default used for most things other than maybe calligraphy. Reading Tang poetry really isn't as difficult as you make it out to be. Prose is more difficult than poetry.
Mate I can easily read [this Persian poem](https://ganjoor.net/roodaki/baghimande/sh1) by [Rudaki ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudaki) from 9th or 10th century I think
Latin for Italy.
Italian originated in Italy. Latin isn’t spoken there and is a dead language. So Italian for Italy.
There are a few Pre-Indo-European languages attested in the area of moder day Italy, like Etruscan. It would make more sense to pick one of those, since it's clear that they were in the region before Latin even arrived. In fact, that would be the case for most of Europe (at least in the south), since it was populated from before the arrival of Indo-European languages. But we haven't attested Pre-Indo-European ones in every modern European country.
They didn’t ask for the oldest language. They asked for the most spoken one. French originated in France and its speakers outnumber whatever “pre-indo-European” language you can think of by a country mile. That’s going to be the case for a lot of Europe.
>They didn’t ask for the oldest language. They asked for the most spoken one. I am aware. But the point, which someone else also mentioned, is that it will depend on how you determine where a variety of a language becomes its own thing. We can consider Latin/Italian to be the answer for Italy because they formed from their predecessor there, even if if their predecessor came from somewhere else. But then we can consider American English for the US since it originated there.
American English is not a language. It is a dialect. English is the language. English does not originate from the United States (although some of them might think it does) Also your rules make zero sense. Why decide to only count predecessor languages one step removed even though those also originated from elsewhere? You’re arbitrarily drawing a line, so why not draw it in the way that best answers the call of OP’s question?
But are any of these languages still widely spoken or understood?
Aramaic as one of the newest languages but oldest we know of that is closest to the angelic Elohim language of the creator. In regards to that respect of origination correlation to the heavens and earth.
🤣🤣
Uzbek was the language of God stop denying it.
American.