Throughout history, people have been interested in knowing how language first began, but n

o one knows exactly where or how this happened. However, we do know a lot about languages, the languages of today and also the languages of earlier times. There are probably about three thousand languages in the world today. Chinese is the language with the most speakers. English, Russian and Spanish are also spoken by millions of people. On the other hand, some languages in the world 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 (最初的) language of this family was spoken about 4,500 years ago. Many of the present languages of Europe and India are modern forms of the language of 4,500 yeas ago.

Languages are always changing. The English of today is very different from the English of 500 years ago. 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.

If a language has a large number of speakers or if it is very old, there may be differences in the way it is spoken in different areas. That is, the language may have several dialects. Chinese is a good example of dialect differences. Chinese has been spoken for thousands of years by millions of speakers. Their differences between the dialects of Chinese are so great that speakers of Chinese from some parts of China cannot understand speakers from other parts.

The first paragraph mainly tells us that ______.

A．most people in the world speak Chinese

B．there are thousands of languages in the world today

C．man has much knowledge about languages

D．some people know several languages