London Has 126 Languages Spoken

Which countries speak the most languages?

The top 10 are:Papua New Guinea 836Indonesia 707Nigeria 529India 454United States 420China 301Mexico 288Cameroon 281Australia 245Brazil 228You can try to control for population - obviously bigger countries will have more languages - in which case countries like Vanuatu (116 languages for 200,000 people) and Central African Republic (84 language for 3 million people) also stand out.Getting an exact count is tricky business, but the best resource on this is Ethnologue, which I where I got these data.A notable miscount, however, may be in the US. While it may be surprising to see it so high, it may be even higher as New York City alone has been estimated to have ~800 language spoken as the most linguistically diverse city in the world (Press | Endangered Language Alliance).India is also reported to have over 700 (Language Research and Publication), again depending a lot on how you count. I suppose there may be bias in some of these studies with incentive to overreport, bringing me back to the SIL data, which seems most objective. SIL may be most likely to miss diversity in large Western cities, too, however, as SIL started as an effort to translate the Bible into as many languages as possible for traveling missionaries.Finally, back to the tricky business of counting languages: It's... tricky business. Distinguishing a language from a dialect isn't trivial (What is the difference between a dialect and a language?),  the fieldwork necessary to uncover these languages is not equivalently distributed around the world and languages are in a constant state of changing, dying and diverging to mention a few challenges. So take these numbers are approximations.

What if the most widely spoken language of Nigeria?

English is easily the most widely spoken language in Nigeria, it is our official language.English in Nigeria comes in the both the official and street versions, for example:OFFICIAL: while at a function in London, the Nigerian President said that Nigerian youths are lazy, uneducated and unwilling to work.STREET: Na so Naija Presido waka go obodo Oyibo go dey run him mouth say awa youths dem ehn; book dem gree read, work dem no gree do, na agbero life dem dey live.The difference is clear. Trust me the street version is more fun as it allows you more room to creatively express yourself.For our local language, the most widely spoken language primarily depends on the part of the country you are answering the question from. I am hausa, living in Lagos, working both in the office and on the field. In the office it is the official english, with friends it's the street version, outside the office yoruba is widely spoken alongsie the street/broken english. If I were to be in any of the Norther or. Eastern parts of the country, the exact same language interchange will play out-but the yoruba will be replaced by any of hausa or igbo languages. The same applies to all other parts of the country.People reading this will now wonder why we easily quarrel if we seem to have our standard homemade version of english for easier communication. The answer is very simple-we are all talking, but we are not just listening. We want to be heard and we don't want to hear people out. Very bad mix.

What language is spoken in London?

No, it's not Arabic, despite what some would have you think.You can still safely get by in England, by talking, surprise surprise… English.

Which is a better foreign language to learn French or Japanese?

It depends on what you mean by “beneficial.”Is your goal to actually use the language (i.e., speak with other speakers of that language)? Do you need it for work, school, or travel?Like the others have said here, your goal will determine your choice, not the other way around.If you go by numbers alone, there are more native speakers of Japanese (126 million) than native speakers of French (about 80 million) in the world. However, when you add in second-language speakers, French speakers outnumber Japanese speakers worldwide: dozens of countries (most of them in West and North Africa) use French as an official or de facto national language.If you by geography (or willingness to travel), then the answer depends on where you live and/or where you travel. If you live in, say, upstate New York and go to Montréal regularly, then learning French makes more sense than learning Japanese. By contrast, an English speaker living in Hong Kong may decide that Japanese is more beneficial to learn.If you want to improve your reading skills and vocabulary size in English, then learn French rather than Japanese. French is both syntactically and lexically closer to English than Japanese is. French is a Romance language (derived from Latin) and gives English over a third of its vocabulary. You’ll find Latinate words in French (rémunération comes to mind) that are far more common than their English counterparts. So if I were asked by a parent which language (French or Japanese) her middle schooler should study in preparation for the SAT, I would say French hands down. (Then again, if you’re learning a foreign language solely to do better on the SAT, then you’ll likely miss out on the larger world that the study of foreign languages can introduce you to.)If by “beneficial,” you mean “most likely to get you outside of your comfort zone,” then Japanese. While studying French (or any foreign language) offers you the chance to see how another culture views and talks about the world, I would argue that Japanese is much harder for English speakers to learn (and perhaps ultimately more satisfying as a result). If you’re not up for the challenge of learning kanji, hirigana, and katakana, however, then French presents a learning curve that’s nowhere near as steep.My recommendation? Start with French (assuming that you’re a native English speaker) and then, after several years of study, try Japanese. There’s no reason you can’t learn both!

How in the first place did we even learn language (the first people like Adam and Eve)?

For anyone to learn a language they need to have a teacher who already knows that language. Language has alwsya existsed - even DNA has it’s own language which all the things associated with it seem to understand. There are even things in the DNA that repair the information, which probably means it has to know know the language to do that.So Adam and Eve would have either been taught what different things were, using a language that God spoke to them in, or they would have already known the language. The Bible says that Adam named the animals, and that God instructed Adam on certain things. All this sugegsts that Adam knew a language, how to speak it, and what it’s words meant, and probably very very quickly.The Bible says that God breathed into Adam and at that point Adam became a living person. And in the Hebrew the ‘breathing’ of God into Adam suggests not just breath, but the idea of characteristics and consciousness. It’s not inconceivable that when God breathed His own breath into Adam that the consciousness of Adam included a full grasp of the language that God spoke.

English (language): Why did people stop using thee, thou, hath, shalt, thy etc. in writing?

One minor emendation to Samridhi's beautifully detailed answer …Thou and thee (genitive/adjectival forms, thy and thine) were the original second person singular forms in Middle English — the remainder of more complex declensions — and the you and ye (genitive/adjectival forms, your and yours) were the second person plural forms.As in many European languages, the trend to use the plural as honorific took hold in English and thus the informal and formal usages of the same pronouns co-existed with their originally only grammatical usage until sociolinguistic effects (confusion about social register, as noted) saw the informal (almost) completely supplanted by what originally had been the formal, creating a Standard English with no distinction between singular and plural.Ironically, nowadays, because the second person singular and its accompanying verbal conjugations (which were eliminated for slightly different reasons, under the force of a simplification process that has been reducing verb forms since Old English) are rare, and rarely seen in writing by most English speakers —outside of quotations from Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible —, one sometimes encounters the archaic forms being used as honorifics, presumably because, to their users, these sound different and therefore are taken to be noble and ennobling.

Is London the most tolerant city in the world?

I would suggest that London is quite tolerant, but how do you measure a city’s tolerance?Would you examine racially motivated attacks from police reports? Most incidences of racism go unreported.For example, I taught in an all girls state school (11–18 years old) very close to where I live a couple years ago. The students (or their parents more specifically) are from across the globe - from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Portugal, Phillipines, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, the Caribbean and so on. A third to maybe a half are Muslim, most Muslim girls wearing some sort of headscarf. Anyhow, one day near the school, one of the students and her Mum (both in headscarves) were walking past a nasty chavvy pub near us to wait to cross the road. A white English yob drinking in the beer garden yelled some sort of racist slur at the girl and her Mum. I was on the other side of our high street and didn’t hear what this idiot said, but I did see this poor Muslim lady and my student shrink back in fear. Later at school some of the girls told me about other experiences of racism they’d experienced in their young lives.We have people from all across the world jostling for space here. There has been an increase in racially motivated attacks since the Brexit refetendum. For instance, sadly, the Polish community centre in Hammersmith was smashed and graffittied over just after the vote. Europeans who live and work here are leaving, quite a few have returned to their countries. Just how our economy is going to function without all the cheap labour from (mostly) Eastern Europe?Another answer to this question below suggested other cities maybe more tolerant than London - like Melbourne, Australia.