CULTUROLOGY --Populations and Languages -- just for fun

POPULATION:
In the beginning of the 20th century the entire world population was less than 2 billion people. Today the current world population has exceeded 6 billions (6,396,000,000).

World Population by Continents

Africa	885,000,000	(13.84%)
The Americas and the Caribbean	875,000,000	(13.68%)
Asia	3,875,000,000	(60.60%)
Europe	727,000,000	(11.37%)
Oceania	32,000,000	(0.50%)
TOTAL	6,394,000,000	(100.00%)

NUMBER OF COUNTRIES:
The United States' State Department recognizes 193 independentcountries around the world.

SPOKEN LANGUAGE:
There are 6,800 known languages spoken in the 193 countries of theworld. 2,261 have writing systems (the others are only spoken) andabout 300 are represented by on-line dictionaries as of May 11, 2004.They are listed at http://www.yourdictionary.com/languages.html.

Most Commonly SpokenLanguages

Rank	Language	Number of Speakers
1	Chinese (Mandarin)	1,000,000,000 +
2	English	508,000,000
3	Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu)	497,000,000
4	Spanish	392,000,000
5	Russian	277,000,000
6	Arabic	246,000,000
7	Bengali	211,000,000
8	Portuguese	191,000,000
9	Malay-Indonesian	159,000,000
10	French	129,000,000

(Source: University of Washington)
WRITTEN LANGUAGE:
The 2,261 languages that have writing systems use different types:

Type	What each symbol represents	Example
Logographic	morpheme	Chinese hanzi
Syllabic	syllable	Japanese kana
Alphabetic	phoneme (consonant or vowel)	Latin alphabet
Abugida	phoneme (consonant+vowel)	Indian Devanāgarī
Abjad	phoneme (consonant)	Arabic alphabet
Featural	phonetic feature	Korean hanguledu