February 21 is World Mother Language Day. Al Jazeera looks at the most spoken languages and which ones are endangered.
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More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today and at least 3,000 of them, or 40 percent, are endangered.
English is the most widely spoken language, with approximately 1.5 billion speakers in 186 countries. Two out of every 10 English speakers are native, while the remaining 80 percent speak English as their second, third or higher language, according to Ethnologue, a database which catalogues the world’s languages.
