World Languages

The names of major world languages are the answer words in the puzzle below.

Find the words that run diagonally, horizontally, and vertically throughout the puzzle grid.

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Based on their historical development, languages are grouped in families. The Indo-European family of languages is the most widely spoken language family on an international scale. Subfamilies in the Indo-European group include: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic, and Slavic. The subfamilies of Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, and Slavic in turn include further subsets of languages. For example the Germanic subfamily includes Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Yiddish; and the Italic subfamily includes: Catalan, French, Galician, Haitian Creole, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish.

There are approximately 6000 languages spoken in the world today, but isolated areas where only small groups of people speak a certain dialect are quickly being replaced with more prevalent tongues. The top ten languages in the world, based on number of native speakers are: Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, English, Spanish, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and German.

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