Did you know there are more than 7,000 different languages in the world? This massive amount of languages can all be traced back to just eleven ancient languages. One of these includes Indo-European, which over time split off into a variety of languages such as Germanic, Hellenic, and Balto-Slavic. These sub-languages have kept branching off throughout history and eventually became what we now know as German, Hindi, and Russian respectively.
Even English, which is currently the most-spoken language in the world, was found to have roots in what was once the Germanic language. Other commonly-spoken languages that stemmed from Germanic include Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, and Bavarian. As mentioned before, English was ranked as the most-spoken language in the world with more than 1.13 billion English speakers, 379 million of which are native speakers. Take a journey through the history of language with this infographic that ranks the 100 most-spoken languages in the world, and trace the lineage of your own language back to its roots.
