User:MartBuck/sandbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spanish is the language that is predominantly understood and spoken as a first, or second language by nearly all of the population of the Republic of Argentina. According to the latest estimations, the population is currently greater than 45 million.[1]
English is another important language in Argentina and is obligatory in primary school instruction in various provinces. Argentina is the only Latin American country characterized as "high aptitude" in English, being placed 15th globally in the year 2015, according to a report from The English Aptitude Index.[2][3] In 2017, Argentina fell ten places from its best position and fell into 25th place, though it continues to be the Ibero-American country with the best English.[4]
Guarani and Quechua are other important languages in Argentina with 200,000 speakers and 65,000 speakers respectively. [5]
Fifteen Indo-American languages[6] currently exist and 5 others (today extinct) existed in different regions. The vernacular Indo-American languages (native to the Argentine territory) are spoken by very few people. In addition there is Lunfardo, a slang or a type of pidgin with original words from many languages, among these languages are ones from the Italian Peninsula, like Piedmontese, Ligurian, and others like Portuguese, etc., and have been seen in the Río de la Plata area since at least 1880. There is also Portuñol, a pidgin of Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish spoken since approximately 1960 in the areas of Argentina that border Brazil.
Another native language is Argentine Sign Language (LSA), which is signed by deaf communities. It emerged in 1885 and influenced many sign languages of the surrounding countries.
After the above mentioned languages German follows (around 400,000, including a significant number of the Volga German dialect and of the Plautdietsch language). The languages Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, Basque, Galician, Catalan, Asturian, Eastern Yiddish, Chinese (some 100,000 speakers, primarily of the Fujian and Taiwan dialects), Korean, Japanese (around 50,000, with a majority of speakers of Okinawan), Romanian, Occitan, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Croatian, Slovene, Czech, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, and Romani are also important. Most of these languages have, with the exception of Chinese and Plautdietsch, very few speakers and are usually only spoken in family environments.