Curated playlist
Stress-timed languages
- Danish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by about 5.5 million people, principally in and around Denmark. It descends from the same ancient source as Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, yet today's spoken Danish is so distinct…
- Norwegian languageNorwegian carries two official written forms at once, a situation found in almost no other country. Bokmål, meaning 'book tongue,' and Nynorsk, meaning 'new Norwegian,' both hold legal status today, each regulated by the Language Council…
- German languageGerman, or Deutsch, is a West Germanic language with nearly 100 million native speakers and over 130 million total speakers as of 2024. It is the majority or official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Few…
- Thai languageThai, known historically as Siamese, is the sole official language of Thailand and the native tongue of the Central Thai people. Over 70 million people speak it inside Thailand as of 2024. Yet the language you hear in Bangkok classrooms…
- Dutch languageDutch, known to its speakers as Nederlands, is spoken by roughly 25 million people as a first language and another 5 million as a second. That makes it the third most spoken Germanic language on earth, after German and English. Yet for a…
- Swedish languageSwedish, known to its speakers as svenska, is the native language of at least 10 million people, making it the fourth most spoken Germanic language in the world and the most widely spoken in the Nordic countries. It belongs to the North…
- Russian languageRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, carried from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to the International Space Station orbiting overhead. It is one of only two languages spoken aboard that station, a practice that…
- ArabicArabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic family, and roughly 380 million people speak it. That figure makes it the fifth-most spoken language on Earth. Yet the speakers themselves draw a line that Western linguists draw…
- Persian languagePersian, known by its own speakers as Farsi, broke a monopoly that had held across the Muslim world. Arabic had dominated writing, but Persian became the first language to push past it. Its poetry took root in courts far from where it…
- Faroese languageFaroese is a language spoken by roughly 69,000 people, most of them living on a cluster of islands in the North Atlantic, with around 21,000 others scattered mainly across Denmark. That is a modest number by any reckoning. Yet Faroese…
- English languageEnglish began as the speech of the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who crossed into Britain after Roman rule collapsed. From those settlers came two names that endure: Ænglaland and Ænglisc, the country and the tongue. Today that…