Languages Having No Majority Worldwide
Linguistic communities that form no majority in any country, but whose language has the status of an official language in at least one country:
- Tamil language: 70 million speakers, official status in Sri Lanka and Singapore, regional status in India
- Amharic language: 25 million speakers, official status in Ethiopia
- Kurdish language: 22 million speakers, official status in Iraq
- Afrikaans language: 13 million first or second language speakers (16 million speakers with basic knowledge), official status in South Africa, recognized regional language in Namibia
- Galician language: 3-4 million speakers, regional official status in Galicia, Spain.
- Welsh language: 791,000 speakers, regional official status in Wales, UK.
- Basque language: 665,800 speakers, regional official status in the Basque Country (autonomous community) and Navarre in Spain. Although It has no official status in the Northern Basque Country in France.
- Irish language: 391,470 native speakers (1.66 million with some knowledge), official status in the Republic of Ireland and an officially recognised minority language in Northern Ireland, UK.
- Māori language: 157,110 speakers, official status in New Zealand
- Romansh language: 60,000 speakers, official status in Switzerland (Graubünden).
Read more about this topic: Minority Language
Famous quotes containing the words languages and/or majority:
“No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don’t want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)