Karshi state university foreign languages faculty

Supercentral languages

At the second highest level, 13 supercentral languages are very widely spoken languages that serve as connectors between speakers of central languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindustani, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and Turkish.

These languages often have colonial traces and "were once imposed by a colonial power and after independence continued to be used in politics, administration, law, big business, technology and higher education".¹

Hypercentral languages

At the highest level is the language that connects speakers of the supercentral languages. Today, English is the only example of a hypercentral language as the standard for science, literature, business, and law, as well as being the most widely spoken second language.

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Pyramid of languages of the world

This pyramid illustrates the hierarchy of the world's languages as proposed by Graddol (1997) in his book, 'The future of English? A guide to forecasting the popularity of the English language in the 21st century', published by the British Council.

According to David Graddol (1997), in his book titled The Future of English, the languages of the world comprise a "hierarchical pyramid", as follows:⁴

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