As far as written languages go, Sumerian and Egyptian seem to have the earliest writing systems and are among the earliest recorded languages, dating back to around 3200BC. But the oldest written language that is still in actual use would probably be Chinese, which first appeared around 1500BC…

1200 BC – 332 BC

As an archaeological era, it was first introduced for Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s.

Brittonic

Place name evidence suggests Cumbric may also have been spoken as far south as Pendle and the Yorkshire Dales. The prevailing view is that it became extinct in the 12th century, after the incorporation of the semi-independent Kingdom of Strathclyde into the Kingdom of Scotland.

Old Norse was the language spoken by the Vikings, and the language in which the Eddas, sagas, and most of the other primary sources for our current knowledge of Norse mythology were written.

Common Brittonic

English doesn’t really have a grammatical gender as many other languages do. It doesn’t have a masculine or a feminine for nouns, unless they refer to biological sex (e.g., woman, boy, Ms etc). So gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender.

Dutch

Icelandic is a rather archaic language. It kept its old noun declension (arguably the hardest part) and verb conjugations. Its archaic vocabulary and complex grammar make it a very difficult language to learn. Icelandic also has four different cases that make it challenging for an English-speaker to learn.

English

Counting the Words in the Dictionary

English Has the Richest Vocabulary

• Number of words in the English language: 500,000 according to the number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.
• Number of people who use English: 750 million.
• Number of people for whom English is their mother tongue: 350 million.

The Polish language uses all types of swearing mentioned. Research has shown that “Polish people hear profanity more often in a public space than in a private space”.

China

Here’s our list of the most beautiful words from other languages with no (direct) English translations:

• Forelsket (Norwegian)
• Kilig (Tagalog)
• Commuovere (Italian)
• Depaysement (French)
• Duende (Spanish)
• Hiraeth (Welsh)
• Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan)
• Toska (Russian)

Arabic might be considered the richest language in words based on its complexity. According to The National – the United Arab Emirates’ leading English-speaking news outlet – on average, a single written word in Arabic has three meanings, seven pronunciations and 12 interpretations.

This means, the German language contains eight times as many words as the English language.In the everyday conversation, we use much less words: only 12.000 – 16.000 words including about 3.500 foreign words. The “Duden”, a popular reference book for grammar and orthography of the German language, lists 135.000 words.

So in conclusion, it is possible that English is more succinct or more “descriptive” than many languages in some particular register or domain, but generalizing to the most descriptive language in all domains appears to be an obvious over-generalization.

Let us find out the most spoken languages and speakers in the country as per 2011 Census.

1. Hindi – 52.83 crore speakers.
2. Bengali – 9.72 crore speakers.
3. Marathi – 8.30 crore speakers.
4. Telugu – 8.11 crore speakers.
5. Tamil – 6.90 crore speakers.
6. Gujarati – 5.54 crore speakers.
7. Urdu – 5.07 crore speakers.