People around the world are today celebrating International Mother Language Day.
The day is a worldwide annual observance to promote the awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism.
It is well known that the Hungarian language is one of the most complicated, complex and richest languages in the world. Hungarian became an independent language about 3,000 years ago, although Latin was the official language in the country until 1844.
The number of words in the Hungarian language is around one million, but even the Hungarian Dictionary contains only 70,000 of them.
Currently, the number of Hungarian native speakers is estimated to be around 14-15 million in the world. But, according to UNESCO more than half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world are threatened with extinction this century.
For a language, a few hundred thousand native speakers are needed for it to survive, and the process of a language dying out is unstoppable - nowadays it is believed that a language disappears every two weeks.