Devanāgarī, (Sanskrit: deva, “god,” and nāgarī (lipi), “[script] of the city”) script used to write the Sanskrit, Prākrit, Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali languages, developed from the North Indian monumental script known as Gupta and ultimately from the Brāhmī alphabet, from which all modern Indian
Lenca, Indians of the northern highlands of Honduras and El Salvador who are somewhat intermediate culturally between the Maya to the north and circum-Caribbean peoples such as the Kuna to the south. The aboriginal culture of the Lenca has virtually disappeared and is not well known. It is thought
The world’s 8 billion inhabitants speak thousands of languages, but most of them are spoken by small populations. About 5 billion people are native speakers of just 25 languages. Below is a list of the 25 languages with the highest number of native speakers, according to data from the Ethnologue
Mandarin language, the most widely spoken form of Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is spoken in all of China north of the Yangtze River and in much of the rest of the country and is the native language of two-thirds of the population. Mandarin Chinese is often divided into four subgroups: Northern
Billions of people around the world speak more than one language. In the case of lingua francas languages, such as English and French, that people learn to facilitate communication across boundaries the high number of non-native speakers often approaches or exceeds the number of native speakers.