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In the Foreign Service Institute’s language classification system, the most difficult languages are at Category 5. These take 88 weeks or 2,200 hours of classroom time to reach proficiency.
SIL Ethnologue (2005) lists 473 out of 6,909 living languages inventorised (6.8%) as "nearly extinct", indicating cases where "only a few elderly speakers are still living"; this figure dropped to 6.1% as of 2013.
However, out of those 256 languages, 238 are in the realm of extinction. [2] That is, 92% of languages that are dying. The United States has the highest number of dying languages, 143 out of 219 languages, [3] then Canada with 75 dying out of its 94 languages, [4] and lastly, Greenland has the smallest number, nil of its two spoken languages. [5]
An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct": [1] Vulnerable; Definitely endangered; Severely ...
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
The United States does not have an official language at the federal level, but the most commonly used language is English (especially American English), which is the de facto national language. In addition, 32 U.S. states out of 50 and all five U.S. territories have declared English as an official language.
Below are the top foreign languages studied in American institutions of higher education (i.e., colleges and universities), based on the Modern Language Association's census of fall 2021 enrollments. "Percentage" refers to each language as a percentage of total U.S. foreign language enrollments. [3]: 49
The languages of North America reflect not only that continent's indigenous peoples, but the European colonization as well. The most widely spoken languages in North America (which includes Central America and the Caribbean islands) are English, Spanish, and to a lesser extent French, and especially in the Caribbean, creole languages lexified by them.