Curated playlist
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. It ranks sixth among the languages of the European Union by number of speakers, yet its reach stretches far…
- Czech languageCzech, known historically as Bohemian, is a West Slavic language spoken by over 12 million people, including second-language speakers. It contains a sound so rare it is found as a phoneme in only a few other languages: the raised alveolar…
- 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…
- 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, French, German, Spanish, and most of the other tongues of Europe. That alone makes…
- 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…
- 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…
- Ukrainian languageUkrainian, or "ukrainska mova" as its speakers call it, carries within its sounds a thousand years of survival against extraordinary pressure. It is an East Slavic language spoken primarily in Ukraine, the native tongue of a large majority…
- 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 speak standard Italian properly. The rest spoke their own city tongues, sister…
- 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 in the Southern Hemisphere. It is official in nine countries scattered across…
- 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…
- 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 reaches speakers in about 50. Yet the most striking fact about it sits in a…
- 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. Yet a modern speaker of Icelandic can pick up a manuscript written eight hundred years ago and read…
- Spanish languageSpanish, called español or castellano, is spoken today by about 519 million people as a native language and roughly 636 million in total. It is the official language of 20 countries and one of the six official languages of the United…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 tongue that once gave the world words for crocodile, brick, and oasis. Its alphabet…
- Greek languageGreek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. A clay tablet found in Messenia, inscribed in the Linear B script and dated to between 1450 and 1350 BC, makes it the…