In 2025, there were around 1.53 billion people worldwide who spoke English either natively or as a second language, slightly more than the 1.18 billion Mandarin Chinese speakers at the time of survey. Hindi and Spanish accounted for the third and fourth most widespread languages that year. Languages in the United States The United States does not have an official language, but the country uses English, specifically American English, for legislation, regulation, and other official pronouncements. The United States is a land of immigration, and the languages spoken in the United States vary as a result of the multicultural population. The second most common language spoken in the United States is Spanish or Spanish Creole, which over than 43 million people spoke at home in 2023. There were also 3.5 million Chinese speakers (including both Mandarin and Cantonese),1.8 million Tagalog speakers, and 1.57 million Vietnamese speakers counted in the United States that year. Different languages at home The percentage of people in the United States speaking a language other than English at home varies from state to state. The state with the highest percentage of population speaking a language other than English is California. About 45 percent of its population was speaking a language other than English at home in 2023.

In 2023, around 43.37 million people in the United States spoke Spanish at home. In comparison, approximately 998,179 people were speaking Russian at home during the same year. The distribution of the U.S. population by ethnicity can be accessed here. A ranking of the most spoken languages across the world can be accessed here.

Find out which are the top 10 most spoken languages in the world according to GeoNames and preserve the data containing the information needed, as some countries get split or merged, some languages get extinct, etc.

As of February 2025, English was the most popular language for web content, with over 49.4 percent of websites using it. Spanish ranked second, with six percent of web content, while the content in the German language followed, with 5.6 percent. English as the leading online language United States and India, the countries with the most internet users after China, are also the world's biggest English-speaking markets. The internet user base in both countries combined, as of January 2023, was over a billion individuals. This has led to most of the online information being created in English. Consequently, even those who are not native speakers may use it for convenience. Global internet usage by regions As of October 2024, the number of internet users worldwide was 5.52 billion. In the same period, Northern Europe and North America were leading in terms of internet penetration rates worldwide, with around 97 percent of its populations accessing the internet.

Context

This is a dataset I found online through the Google Dataset Search portal.

Content

The American Community Survey (ACS) 2009-2013 multi-year data are used to list all languages spoken in the United States that were reported during the sample period. These tables provide detailed counts of many more languages than the 39 languages and language groups that are published annually as a part of the routine ACS data release. This is the second tabulation beyond 39 languages since ACS began.

The tables include all languages that were reported in each geography during the 2009 to 2013 sampling period. For the purpose of tabulation, reported languages are classified in one of 380 possible languages or language groups. Because the data are a sample of the total population, there may be languages spoken that are not reported, either because the ACS did not sample the households where those languages are spoken, or because the person filling out the survey did not report the language or reported another language instead.

The tables also provide information about self-reported English-speaking ability. Respondents who reported speaking a language other than English were asked to indicate their ability to speak English in one of the following categories: "Very well," "Well," "Not well," or "Not at all." The data on ability to speak English represent the person’s own perception about his or her own ability or, because ACS questionnaires are usually completed by one household member, the responses may represent the perception of another household member.

These tables are also available through the Census Bureau's application programming interface (API). Please see the developers page for additional details on how to use the API to access these data.

Acknowledgements

Sources:

Google Dataset Search: https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch

2009-2013 American Community Survey

Original dataset: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2013/demo/2009-2013-lang-tables.html

Downloaded From: https://data.world/kvaughn/languages-county

Banner and thumbnail photo by Farzad Mohsenvand on Unsplash

The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 22 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swahili (ELRA-S0375), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Ukrainian (ELRA-S0377), and Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322).In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary. The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6). The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 2100 native adult speakers.Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten.The Polish part of GlobalPhone was collected from altogether 102 native speakers in Poland, of which 48 speakers were female and 54 speakers were male. The majority of speakers are between 20 and 39 years old, the age distribution ranges from 18 to 65 years. Most of the speakers are non-smokers in good health conditions. Each speaker read on average about 100 utterances from newspaper articles, in total we recorded 10130 utterances. The speech was recorded using a close-talking microphone Sennheiser HM420 in a push-to-talk scenario. All data were recorded at 16kHz and 16bit resolution in PCM format. The data collection took place in small and large rooms, about half of the recordings took place under very quiet noise conditions, the other half with moderate background noise. Information on recording place and environmental noise conditions are provided in a separate speaker session file for each speaker. The text data used for reco...

Mexico is the country with the largest number of native Spanish speakers in the world. As of 2024, 132.5 million people in Mexico spoke Spanish with a native command of the language. Colombia was the nation with the second-highest number of native Spanish speakers, at around 52.7 million. Spain came in third, with 48 million, and Argentina fourth, with 46 million. Spanish, a world language As of 2023, Spanish ranked as the fourth most spoken language in the world, only behind English, Chinese, and Hindi, with over half a billion speakers. Spanish is the official language of over 20 countries, the majority on the American continent, nonetheless, it's also one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea in Africa. Other countries have a strong influence, like the United States, Morocco, or Brazil, countries included in the list of non-Hispanic countries with the highest number of Spanish speakers. The second most spoken language in the U.S. In the most recent data, Spanish ranked as the language, other than English, with the highest number of speakers, with 12 times more speakers as the second place. Which comes to no surprise following the long history of migrations from Latin American countries to the Northern country. Moreover, only during the fiscal year 2022. 5 out of the top 10 countries of origin of naturalized people in the U.S. came from Spanish-speaking countries.

Analysis of ‘Languages spoken across various nations’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/shubhamptrivedi/languages-spoken-across-various-nations on 13 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

I was fascinated by this type of data as this gives a slight peek on cultural diversity of a nation and what kind of literary work to be expected from that nation

Content

This dataset is a collection of all the languages that are spoken by the different nations around the world. Nowadays, Most nations are bi or even trilingual in nature this can be due to different cultures and different groups of people are living in the same nation in harmony. This type of data can be very useful for linguistic research, market research, advertising purposes, and the list goes on.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was published on the site Infoplease which is a general information website.

Inspiration

I think this dataset can be useful to understand which type of literature publication can be done for maximum penetration of the market base

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

As of 2023, more than ** percent of people in the United States spoke a language other than English at home. California had the highest share among all U.S. states, with ** percent of its population speaking a language other than English at home.

The first public large-scale multilingual Twitter dataset related to the FIFA World Cup 2022, comprising over 28 million posts in 69 unique spoken languages, including Arabic, English, Spanish, French, and many others. This dataset aims to facilitate research in future sentiment analysis, cross-linguistic studies, event-based analytics, meme and hate speech detection, fake news detection, and social manipulation detection.

The file 🚨Qatar22WC.csv🚨 contains tweet-level and user-level metadata for our collected tweets. 🚀Codebook for FIFA World Cup 2022 Twitter Dataset🚀 | Column Name | Description| |-------------------------------- |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | day, month, year | The date where the tweet posted | | hou, min, sec | Hour, minute, and second of tweet timestamp | | age_of_the_user_account | User Account age in days | | tweet_count | Total number of tweets posted by the user | | location | User-defined location field | | follower_count | Number of followers the user has | | following_count | Number of accounts the user is following | | follower_to_Following | Follower-following ratio | | favouite_count | Number of likes the user did| | verified | Boolean indicating if the user is verified (1 = Verified, 0 = Not Verified) | | Avg_tweet_count | Average tweets per day for the user activity| | list_count | Number of lists the user is a member | | Tweet_Id | Tweet ID | | is_reply_tweet | ID of the tweet being replied to (if applicable) | | is_quote | boolean representing if the tweet is a quote | | retid | Retweet ID if it's a retweet; NaN otherwise | | lang | Language of the tweet | | hashtags | The keyword or hashtag used to collect the tweet | | is_image, | Boolean indicating if the tweet associated with image| | is_video | Boolean indicating if the tweet associated with video | |-------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Examples of use case queries are described in the file 🚨fifa_wc_qatar22_examples_of_use_case_queries.ipynb🚨 and accessible via: https://github.com/khairied/Qata_FIFA_World_Cup_22

🚀 Please Cite This as: Daouadi, K. E., Boualleg, Y., Guehairia, O. & Taleb-Ahmed, A. (2025). Tracking the Global Pulse: The first public Twitter dataset from FIFA World Cup, Journal of Computational Social Science.

Does the person speak a language other than English at home? This map takes a look at answers to this question from Census Night.Colour:For each SA1 geography, the colour indicates which language 'wins'.SA1 geographies not coloured are either tied between two languages or not enough data Colour Intensity:The colour intensity compares the values of the winner to all other values and returns its dominance over other languages in the same geographyNotes:Only considers top 6 languages for VICCensus 2016 DataPacksPredominance VisualisationsSource CodeNotice that while one language level appears to dominate certain geographies, it doesn't necessarily mean it represents the majority of the population. In fact, as you explore most areas, you will find the predominant language makes up just a fraction of the population due to the number of languages considered.

The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 22 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swahili (ELRA-S0375), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Ukrainian (ELRA-S0377), and Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322).In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary. The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6). The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 2100 native adult speakers.Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten.The Spanish (Latin America) corpus was produced using the La Nacion newspaper. It contains recordings of 100 speakers (44 males, 56 females) recorded in Heredia and San Jose, Costa Rica. The following age distribution has been obtained: 20 speakers are below 19, 54 speakers are between 20 and 29, 13 speakers are between 30 and 39, 5 speakers are between 40 and 49, and 8 speakers are over 50.

Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. As of 2025, it was home to 840 different languages. Indonesia ranked second with 709 languages spoken. In the United States, 335 languages were spoken in that same year.

The SPADE project aims to develop and apply user-friendly software for large-scale speech analysis of existing public and private English speech datasets, in order to understand more about English speech over space and time. To date, we have worked with 42 shared corpora comprising dialects from across the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland) and North America (US, Canada), with an effective time span of over 100 years. We make available here a link to our OSF repository (see below) which has acoustic measures datasets for sibilants and durations and static formants for vowels, for 39 corpora (~2200 hours of speech analysed from ~8600 speakers), with information about dataset generation. In addition, at the OSF site, we provide Praat TextGrids created by SPADE for some corpora. Reading passage text is provided when the measures are based on reading only. Datasets are in their raw form and will require cleaning (e.g. outlier removal) before analysis. In addition, we used whitelisting to anonymise measures datasets generated from non-public, restricted corpora.

Obtaining a data visualization of a text search within seconds via generic, large-scale search algorithms, such as Google n-gram viewer, is available to anyone. By contrast, speech research is only now entering its own 'big data' revolution. Historically, linguistic research has tended to carry out fine-grained analysis of a few aspects of speech from one or a few languages or dialects. The current scale of speech research studies has shaped our understanding of spoken language and the kinds of questions that we ask. Today, massive digital collections of transcribed speech are available from many different languages, gathered for many different purposes: from oral histories, to large datasets for training speech recognition systems, to legal and political interactions. Sophisticated speech processing tools exist to analyze these data, but require substantial technical skill. Given this confluence of data and tools, linguists have a new opportunity to answer fundamental questions about the nature and development of spoken language.

Our project seeks to establish the key tools to enable large-scale speech research to become as powerful and pervasive as large-scale text mining. It is based on a partnership of three teams based in Scotland, Canada and the US. Together we exploit methods from computing science and put them to work with tools and methods from speech science, linguistics and digital humanities, to discover how much the sounds of English across the Atlantic vary over space and time.

We have developed innovative and user-friendly software which exploits the availability of existing speech data and speech processing tools to facilitate large-scale integrated speech corpus analysis across many datasets together. The gains of such an approach are substantial: linguists will be able to scale up answers to existing research questions from one to many varieties of a language, and ask new and different questions about spoken language within and across social, regional, and cultural, contexts. Computational linguistics, speech technology, forensic and clinical linguistics researchers, who engage with variability in spoken language, will also benefit directly from our software. This project also opens up vast potential for those who already use digital scholarship for spoken language collections in the humanities and social sciences more broadly, e.g. literary scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists. The possibility of ethically non-invasive inspection of speech and texts will allow analysts to uncover far more than is possible through textual analysis alone.

Our project has developed and applied our new software to a global language, English, using existing public and private spoken datasets of Old World (British Isles) and New World (North American) English, across an effective time span of more than 100 years, spanning the entire 20th century. Much of what we know about spoken English comes from influential studies on a few specific aspects of speech from one or two dialects. This vast literature has established important research questions which has been investigated for the first time on a much larger scale, through standardized data across many different varieties of English.

Our large-scale study complements current-scale studies, by enabling us to consider stability and change in English across the 20th century on an unparalleled scale. The global nature of English means that our findings will be interesting and relevant to a large international non-academic audience; they have been made accessible through an innovative and dynamic visualization of linguistic variation via an interactive sound mapping website. In addition to new insights into spoken English, this project also lays the crucial groundwork for large-scale speech studies across many datasets from different languages, of...

The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 22 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swahili (ELRA-S0375), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Ukrainian (ELRA-S0377), and Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322).In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary. The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6). The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 2100 native adult speakers.Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten.The Korean corpus was produced using the Hankyoreh Daily News. It contains recordings of 100 speakers (50 males, 50 females) recorded in Seoul, Korea. The following age distribution has been obtained: 7 speakers are below 19, 70 speakers are between 20 and 29, 19 speakers are between 30 and 39, and 3 speakers are between 40 and 49 (1 speaker age is unknown).

According to Cognitive Market Research, the global language services market size was estimated at USD 58.9 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.2% from 2023 to 2030. Which Factors Drives the Language Services Market Growth?

Cross-border contact has become more intense due to globalization, increasing the need for translation, localization, and interpretation services. Language solutions are required by growing multinational businesses, e-commerce, and multilingual customer service. Growth is also fueled by government programs that support accessibility and multilingualism. Technology advancements, including AI-driven translation tools, increase productivity and widen the market.

These developments empower businesses to offer better-tailored solutions and services, which, in turn, contribute to the growth of the Language Services industry.

For instance, A well-known international provider of language services, BIG Language Solutions, revealed in April 2022 that it had acquired the Milan-based company Lawlinguists, which offers legal translation services. With the addition of Italy, Germany, and Spain to BIG's European footprint through the purchase, its clients now have access to a wider range of excellent legal translation services, resources, and technology.

(Source:biglanguage.com/blog/big-acquires-lawlinguists-expands-legal-offering-and-european-presence/)

Globalization and Internationalization to Provide Viable Market Output

A significant market driver for language services has been globalization. Communication in various languages is becoming increasingly important as firms grow internationally. The expansion of international trade, e-commerce, and cross-border investments all contribute to this trend. Companies must translate, localize, and adapt their products and services to local languages and cultures to remain competitive in the global market.

There are approximately 7,139 languages spoken in the world today. However, many of these languages are endangered, with experts estimating that around 40% of languages are at risk of extinction.

(Source:www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2019/10/many-indigenous-languages-are-danger-extinction)

Multinational corporations with diverse workforces and clients from various language backgrounds have become popular due to globalization. These enterprises rely on translation services to eliminate language barriers to guarantee efficient internal communication and seamless relations with external parties. Language solutions, including document, website, and marketing material translation and conference and meeting interpretation services, greatly aid international collaboration and understanding.

Technological Advancements to Propel Market Growth





Localization of Digital Content

Factors Restraining Growth of the Language Services Market

Machine Translation Limitations to Hinder Market Growth

The constraints of machine translation constrain the language services market. While machine translation quality has increased due to technological developments in AI, especially for complicated or specialized information, it still falls short of human translation in accuracy and nuance. The context and idiomatic idioms that machine translation systems frequently struggle with might cause translations to sound uncomfortable or inaccurate to native speakers. This restriction is especially important for fields like law, medicine, and marketing, where accuracy and cultural appropriateness are key.

How COVID-19 Impacted the Language Services Market?

To reach a worldwide audience, the pandemic drove digital transformation and remote labor, driving up demand for translation and localization services. Translations in the medical and scientific fields increased as information sharing became essential. Travel restrictions hampered on-site interpreting services simultaneously, increasing the demand for remote interpreting services. Due to the pandemic's emphasis on efficient intercultural communication, businesses, the medical community, and governments have all prioritized language services to enable proper information flow and support during the crisis What is Language Services?

Language services means it is a professional service used for communication and understanding between different cultural groups. It facilitates effective comm...

Analysis of ‘Extinct Languages’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/the-guardian/extinct-languages on 28 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

A recent Guardian blog post asks: "How many endangered languages are there in the World and what are the chances they will die out completely?" The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) regularly publishes a list of endangered languages, using a classification system that describes its danger (or completion) of extinction.

Content

The full detailed dataset includes names of languages, number of speakers, the names of countries where the language is still spoken, and the degree of endangerment. The UNESCO endangerment classification is as follows:

• Vulnerable: most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)
• Definitely endangered: children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home
• Severely endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
• Critically endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently
• Extinct: there are no speakers left

Acknowledgements

Data was originally organized and published by The Guardian, and can be accessed via this Datablog post.

Inspiration

• How can you best visualize this data?
• Which rare languages are more isolated (Sicilian, for example) versus more spread out? Can you come up with a hypothesis for why that is the case?
• Can you compare the number of rare speakers with more relatable figures? For example, are there more Romani speakers in the world than there are residents in a small city in the United States?

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 22 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swahili (ELRA-S0375), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Ukrainian (ELRA-S0377), and Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322).In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary. The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6). The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 2100 native adult speakers.Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten.The Japanese corpus was produced using the Nikkei Shinbun newspaper. It contains recordings of 149 speakers (104 males, 44 females, 1 unspecified) recorded in Tokyo, Japan. The following age distribution has been obtained: 22 speakers are below 19, 90 speakers are between 20 and 29, 5 speakers are between 30 and 39, 2 speakers are between 40 and 49, and 1 speaker is over 50 (28 speakers age is unknown).

The GlobalPhone corpus developed in collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) was designed to provide read speech data for the development and evaluation of large continuous speech recognition systems in the most widespread languages of the world, and to provide a uniform, multilingual speech and text database for language independent and language adaptive speech recognition as well as for language identification tasks. The entire GlobalPhone corpus enables the acquisition of acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the following 22 spoken languages: Arabic (ELRA-S0192), Bulgarian (ELRA-S0319), Chinese-Mandarin (ELRA-S0193), Chinese-Shanghai (ELRA-S0194), Croatian (ELRA-S0195), Czech (ELRA-S0196), French (ELRA-S0197), German (ELRA-S0198), Hausa (ELRA-S0347), Japanese (ELRA-S0199), Korean (ELRA-S0200), Polish (ELRA-S0320), Portuguese (Brazilian) (ELRA-S0201), Russian (ELRA-S0202), Spanish (Latin America) (ELRA-S0203), Swahili (ELRA-S0375), Swedish (ELRA-S0204), Tamil (ELRA-S0205), Thai (ELRA-S0321), Turkish (ELRA-S0206), Ukrainian (ELRA-S0377), and Vietnamese (ELRA-S0322).In each language about 100 sentences were read from each of the 100 speakers. The read texts were selected from national newspapers available via Internet to provide a large vocabulary. The read articles cover national and international political news as well as economic news. The speech is available in 16bit, 16kHz mono quality, recorded with a close-speaking microphone (Sennheiser 440-6). The transcriptions are internally validated and supplemented by special markers for spontaneous effects like stuttering, false starts, and non-verbal effects like laughing and hesitations. Speaker information like age, gender, occupation, etc. as well as information about the recording setup complement the database. The entire GlobalPhone corpus contains over 450 hours of speech spoken by more than 2100 native adult speakers.Data is shortened by means of the shorten program written by Tony Robinson. Alternatively, the data could be delivered unshorten.The GlobalPhone Ukrainian corpus contains 12,814 utterances spoken by 119 speakers. Native speakers of Ukrainian were asked to read prompted sentences of articles from 9 Ukrainian newspapers. The entire collection took place in Donezk, Ukraine.

Hindi, with over *** million native speakers was the most spoken language across Indian homes, followed by Bengali with ** million speakers, as of 2011 census data. English native speakers accounted for about *** thousand during the measured time period. The colonial rule in India One of the most remarkable and widespread legacies that the British colonial rule left behind was the English language. Before independence, the English language was the solely used for higher education and in government and administrative processes. Post-independence, however, and till today, Hindi was claimed as the language with official government patronage. This lead to resistance from the southern states of India, where Hindi did not have prominence. Consequently, the Official Languages Act of 1963, was enacted by the parliament, which ensured the continued use of English for official purposes in conjunction with Hindi. Multi-linguistic cultures India has approximately ** major languages that are written in about ** different scripts. While the country’s official languages are both, English and Hindi, Hindi remains the most preferred language used online especially in the northern rural areas. The use of English is becoming increasingly popular in the urban areas. In addition, almost every state in India has its own official language that is studied in primary and secondary school as an obligatory second language. Among the most prominent are Bengali, Marathi, and Telugu.