Curated category
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 languageNorwegian carries two official written forms at once, a situation found in almost no other country. Bokmål, meaning 'book tongue,' and Nynorsk, meaning 'new…
- German languageGerman, or Deutsch, is a West Germanic language with nearly 100 million native speakers and over 130 million total speakers as of 2024.
- Thai languageThai, known historically as Siamese, is the sole official language of Thailand and the native tongue of the Central Thai people.
- 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.
- 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…
- Russian languageRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, carried from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to the International Space Station orbiting…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- English languageEnglish began as the speech of the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who crossed into Britain after Roman rule collapsed.