L'italiano è una lingua romanza, diretta erede del latino, basata sul fiorentino letterario usato nel Trecento, appartenente al gruppo italico della famiglia delle lingue indoeuropee. L'italiano modello[3] convive anche in Italia con un gran numero di idiomi neo-romanzi e ha diverse varianti regionali, per via dell'influenza che su di esso esercitano le lingue regionali. Le lingue regionali tuttavia vengono parlate parallelamente alla lingua standard. L'italiano è lingua ufficiale dell'Italia[4], di San Marino[5], della Svizzera[6] (insieme al tedesco, al francese e al romancio), della Città del Vaticano (insieme al latino) e del Sovrano Militare Ordine di Malta. È seconda lingua ufficiale, dopo il croato, nella Regione Istriana (Croazia) e, dopo lo sloveno, nelle città di Pirano, Isola d'Istria e Capodistria in Slovenia. L'italiano è una delle ventitré lingue ufficiali dell'Unione europea. È inoltre diffuso in alcune aree dei paesi mediterranei e nelle comunità di origine italiana nei diversi continenti.
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the extensive influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via the British Empire, and of the United States since the mid-20th century,[6][7][8][9] it has been widely dispersed around the world, becoming the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions.[10][11] It is widely learned as a second language and used as an official language of the European Union and many Commonwealth countries, as well as in many world organisations. It is the third most natively spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.[12] It is the most widely spoken language across the world.[13] Historically, English originated from the fusion of languages and dialects, now collectively termed Old English, which were brought to the eastern coast of Great Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) settlers by the 5th century %u2013 with the word English being derived from the name of the Angles, and ultimately from their ancestral region of Angeln (in what is now Schleswig-Holstein).[14] A significant number of English words are constructed based on roots from Latin, because Latin in some form was the lingua franca of the Christian Church and of European intellectual life.[15] The language was further influenced by the Old Norse language due to Viking invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Norman conquest of England in the 11th century gave rise to heavy borrowings from Norman-French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give the superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages[16][17] to what had now become Middle English. The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events that mark the emergence of Modern English from Middle English. Owing to the assimilation of words from many other languages throughout history, modern English contains a very large vocabulary. Modern English has not only assimilated words from other European languages but also from all over the world, including words of Hindi and African origin. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words, not including many technical, scientific, or slang terms.
Le français est une langue romane de la famille des langues indo-européennes. Le français, qui s'est formé en France (variété de la « langue d%u2019oïl »), est aujourd'hui parlé sur tous les continents : avec approximativement 220 millions de locuteurs francophones dans le monde, plus 72 millions de locuteurs partiels (évaluation Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie : 2010), le français est la sixième langue la plus parlée dans le monde (consulter la liste des langues par nombre total de locuteurs). Elle est une des six langues officielles et une des deux langues de travail (avec l%u2019anglais) de l%u2019Organisation des Nations unies, et langue officielle ou de travail de plusieurs organisations internationales ou régionales, dont l%u2019Union européenne. Après avoir été à l%u2019époque de l%u2019Ancien Régime français la langue des cours royales et princières, des tsars de Russie aux rois d%u2019Espagne et d'Angleterre en passant par les princes de l%u2019Allemagne, elle demeure une langue importante de la diplomatie internationale aux côtés de l%u2019anglais et de l%u2019espagnol. La langue française est un attribut de souveraineté en France : la langue officielle de la République française est le français (article 2 de la Constitution de 1958). Elle est également le principal véhicule de la pensée et de la culture française dans le monde. La langue française fait l%u2019objet d%u2019un dispositif public d%u2019enrichissement de la langue, avec le décret du 3 juillet 1996 relatif à l'enrichissement de la langue française. La langue française a cette particularité que son développement et sa codification ont été en partie l%u2019%u0153uvre de groupes intellectuels, comme la Pléiade, ou d%u2019institutions, comme l%u2019Académie française. C%u2019est une langue dite « académique ». Toutefois, l%u2019usage garde ses droits et nombreux sont ceux qui malaxèrent cette langue vivante, au premier rang desquels Rabelais et Molière : il est d%u2019ailleurs question de la « langue de Molière ».