The Polish linguist L.L. Zamenhof is most famous for his attempts to create a universal second language, called “Esperanto.” In his attempts to accomplish this, Zamenhof incorporated linguistic features from a wide variety of languages. He envisioned the language as something with which people all over the world, regardless of native language, could use to communicate with one another. So far, it has not been adopted in the manner Zamenhof intended, but the idea remains interesting and influential.

The United States has no official language. The reason for this has its roots in notions of American liberty and the national and ethnic composition of the United States at the time of independence - although English was the most commonly spoken language, the people of the early United States were from all over Europe and spoke a wide variety of languages. It was deemed a violation of individual liberty to prescribe an official language in such a setting and this has persisted to this day.

German is actually a High German language. Dutch is the only language on this list that is considered Low German. English is related to the Low German language (but has since been reclassified as Anglo-Frisian). French and Romanian are both Latin or “Romance” languages. Swedish is a Norse language. All of these languages are necessity part of the larger language family known as the Indo-European family.

Swahili is the most widely spoken language in the Niger-Congo language family, if the total number of speakers, rather than total number of native speakers is used as the primary determinant. It is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and several other east African countries. It is the Lingua Franca of southeastern Africa.

A “creole” language is a language that has arisen from an earlier pidgin language and become the primary language for a specific cultural group. Creole languages are distinct from pidgin languages in that they are less fluid, more widely understood, and more defined linguistic features and boundaries. Class and cultural oppression may be factors in the development of a creole language, but they are not central factors to the definition of such languages.

Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic are considered part of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages. Welsh is spoken by a minority of people in Wales, where the majority language is English. Welsh is fundamentally different in structure and sound than English. Both English and Welsh are, however, both part of the Indo-European language family so the difference is not nearly as great as the difference between, for instance, English and Thai.

All of these languages are part of the Sino-Tibet family of languages except Russian, which is a variety of Old Slavic, which is part of the Indo-European language family. The Sino-Tibet language family is concentrated in east and southeast Asia. If it helps you remember “Sino” means concerned with or related to China.

All of these languages are part of the Latin branch of the Indo-European languages except Czech which is part of the Balto-Slavic language family along with Polish, Russian, and Bulgarian.

Mandarin, even though not spoken by all of the Chinese population, is nonetheless the most widely spoken language in the world. It has roughly a billion native speakers, far more than the roughly three-hundred and seventy-five million native speakers of English.

Yiddish is the only other language, besides German, that is considered a High German language. Dutch is a Low German language, Danish is a Norse language, Thai is part of the Tai-Kadai language family, and Hebrew is a Semitic language, which is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.