Language
The official language of Libya is Standard Arabic. However, the prevalent spoken language is Libyan Arabic. This language is spoken by about 6 million Libyans, besides other Arabic dialects (partly spoken by immigrant workers, partly by native populations), viz. Egyptian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic, South Levantine Arabic and Hassaniyya Arabic, amounting to a total number of first-language Arabic speakers of about 95% of total population.
SIL Ethnologue indigenous minority languages in Libya:
- Berber languages: ca. 305,000 speakers
- Nafusi: 184,000 (2006)
- Tamahaq: 47,000 (2006)
- Ghadamès: 30,000 (2006)
- Sawknah: 5,600 (2006)
- Awjilah: 3,000 (2000)
- Domari: ca. 33,000 speakers (2006)
- Tedaga: 2,000
Non-Arabic languages spoken by temporary foreign workers include (with more than 10,000 speakers each): Punjabi, Urdu, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Sinhala, Bengal, Tamil, Tagalog, French, Italian, Ukrainian, Serbian, English.
Read more about this topic: Libyan
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”
—Frederico Fellini (1920–1993)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“These are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)