English (UN Official Language)
Indo-European family (Germanic branch) · Latin script. An official language in more than 60 countries, and the de facto lingua franca of international business, academia, and aviation.
French (UN Official Language)
Indo-European family (Romance branch) · Latin script. An official language in 29 countries due in large part to its colonial history, including many across Africa, and an official language of the UN and the Olympics, among other international bodies.
Spanish (UN Official Language)
Indo-European family (Romance branch) · Latin script. The official language of Spain and most of Latin America, and one of the most widely spoken languages in the world by number of native speakers.
Russian (UN Official Language)
Indo-European family (Slavic branch) · Cyrillic script. Widely spoken across Russia and former Soviet states, and one of the few major world languages that does not use the Latin alphabet.
Arabic (UN Official Language)
Afroasiatic family (Semitic branch) · Arabic script, written right to left. An official language in more than 20 countries across the Middle East and North Africa, and the language of the Quran.
Chinese (Mandarin) (UN Official Language)
Sino-Tibetan family · Chinese characters. The language with the largest number of native speakers in the world, and a tonal language, where the meaning of a syllable changes depending on pitch.
Portuguese (Major European Language)
Indo-European family (Romance branch) · Latin script. An official language in 9 countries, with by far its largest population of speakers in Brazil, making it effectively the dominant language of South America.
German (Major European Language)
Indo-European family (Germanic branch) · Latin script. An official language in Germany, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, and the language with the most native speakers within the European Union.
Italian (Major European Language)
Indo-European family (Romance branch) · Latin script. An official language of Italy, San Marino, and Vatican City, and closely associated with opera and Renaissance art.
Hindi (Major Asian Language)
Indo-European family (Indo-Aryan branch) · Devanagari script. One of India's official languages, used alongside English for federal government business, written in the Devanagari script derived from Sanskrit.
Bengali (Major Asian Language)
Indo-European family (Indo-Aryan branch) · Bengali script. The official language of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was the first Asian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Indonesian (Major Asian Language)
Austronesian family · Latin script. Standardized from Malay, it is the official language of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, and serves as a unifying language across hundreds of local languages.
Japanese (Major Asian Language)
Japonic family · a mix of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Notable for using three different writing systems together, and classified as a language isolate with no clearly established relationship to other language families.