A、People’s interest in how languages began. B、Languages today and past. C、The important language families. D、The English languag

Throughout history, people have been interested in knowing how language first began, but no one knows exactly where and how this happened. However, we do know a lot about the languages of today and also the languages of earlier times. There are probably about 3,000 languages in the world today. Chinese is the language with the most speakers. English, Hindi, Urdu, Russian and Spanish are also spoken by millions of people. On the other hand, some languages have less than one hundred speakers.
    There are several important families of languages in the world. For example, most of the languages of Europe are in one large family called Indo-European. The original language of this family was spoken about 4,500 years ago. Many of the present day languages of Europe and India are modern forms of it.
    Languages are always changing. The English of today is very different from the English of 500 years ago. In time, some even die out completely. About 1,000 years ago English was a little-known relative of German spoken on one of the borders of Europe.