Curated category
Subject–verb–object languages
- Polish languagePolish, known in its own tongue as język polski, is a West Slavic language spoken natively by over 39.7 million people as of 2024.
- Czech languageCzech, known historically as Bohemian, is a West Slavic language spoken by over 12 million people, including second-language speakers.
- 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…
- Finnish languageFinnish, known to its speakers as suomi, belongs to a family of languages that has no connection to the great Indo-European tree that gave rise to English…
- Thai languageThai, known historically as Siamese, is the sole official language of Thailand and the native tongue of the Central Thai people.
- 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…
- Ukrainian languageUkrainian, or "ukrainska mova" as its speakers call it, carries within its sounds a thousand years of survival against extraordinary pressure.
- Italian languageItalian almost did not exist as a spoken language. In 1861, when Italy unified, the linguist Tullio De Mauro estimated that only 2.5% of the population could…
- Portuguese languagePortuguese carries roughly 267 million native speakers, making it the fifth-most spoken native language on earth and the most widely spoken language anywhere…
- Russian languageRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, carried from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn to the International Space Station orbiting…
- French languageFrench is a Romance language with about 310 million speakers, of which roughly 74 million are native speakers. It is an official language in 26 countries and…
- Icelandic languageIcelandic is a language spoken by about 390,000 people, most of them living on a North Atlantic island smaller than the state of Kentucky.
- Spanish languageSpanish, called español or castellano, is spoken today by about 519 million people as a native language and roughly 636 million in total.
- 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…
- 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.
- Coptic languageCoptic is a language that has not been spoken natively for centuries, yet it is heard in churches every single week. It is the final form of Egyptian, the…
- Greek languageGreek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.