Central languages
The next level constitutes about 100 central languages, spoken by 95% of the world's population and generally used in education, media and administration. Typically, they are the 'national' and official languages of the ruling state. These are the languages of record, and much of what has been said and written in those languages is saved in newspaper reports, minutes and proceedings, stored in archives, included in history books, collections of the 'classics', of folk talks and folk ways, increasingly recorded on electronic media and thus conserved for posterity.1
Many speakers of central languages are multilingual because they are either native speakers of a peripheral language and have acquired the central language, or they are native speakers of the central language and have learned a supercentral language.
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