Languages of our Missionary Children

El Evangelio es verdadero, 福音是真實的, L'Evangile est vrai, Das Evangelium ist wahr, Vajtswv txoj lus yog qhov tseeb, Evangeliet er sant, Евангелие истинно, พระเยซูเป็นความจริง.... in any language, THE GOSPEL IS TRUE!

Please welcome back Shannon Avery as our guest blogger today!

As of a week ago, the worldwide membership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was 15,082,028. Of those, 83,035 are serving as full-time missionaries (actually, that number went up Wednesday when over 1,000 entered our 15 MTCs around the globe!), and over 10,000 have mission calls or are working on their paperwork. These missionaries are serving in 405 missions around the world!

One of the facts that interested me the most when I read these statistics, was that our missionary children speak in 189 published languages!! This doesn't include the unpublished languages spoken by tribes, gypsies, and other smaller groups. WOW!

This really piqued my curiosity, so I started digging further. First, I found data regarding the most spoken languages in the world. Topping the list is Mandarin Chinese, with nearly two BILLION speakers! WHAT?!! This data includes all speakers of the languages, not only native speakers:

Mandarin Chinese -- 1,917,000, 000

Spanish -- 406,000,000

English -- 335,000,000

Hindi -- 260,000,000

Arabic -- 223, 000, 000

Portuguese -- 202, 000, 000

Bengali -- 193, 000, 000

Russian -- 162, 000, 000

Japanese -- 122, 000, 000

Javanese -- 84, 300, 000

I was interested to see how this data compared to the most common languages spoken by the over 15 million members of our global church. The data I found is for native speakers ONLY, so doesn't include languages learned by missionaries:

...

•  English—6,008,000—47.8%
• Spanish—3,903,000—31.1%
• Portuguese—970,000—7.7%
• Tagalog—172,000—1.4%
• Cebuano—131,000—1.0%
• Japanese—118,000—0.9%
• Ilokano—113,000—0.9%
• Samoan—107,000—0.9%
• Tongan—80,000—0.6%
• Korean—79,000—0.6%
• All others—7%

This gave me the idea to find out what languages the children of our Missionary Mommas Facebook group are speaking (those who commented on my post). Although my data is not representative of all the missionaries serving, I feel like our group of almost 5,000 Missionary Mommas is a good representation of a cross section of current missionaries. And, although this is not meant to be scientific in any way, it sure does make you feel good to be a part of something so amazing!

Afrikaans
Albanian
American Sign Language
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Bicolano
Bislama
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Cantonese
Castillano
Cebuano
Chamorro
Chuukese
Coloqua
Cree
Creole Portuguese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dari
Dutch
English
Estonian
Fante
Farsi
Fijian
Finnish
Flemish
French
French Tahitian
German
Guarani
Haitian Creole
Hebrew
Hiligaynon
Hindi
Hmomg
Hungarian
Icelandic
Ilokano
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Kazakh
Khmer
Kiribati
Korean
Krio
Loatian
Macedonian
Malay
Malagasy
Mandarin Chinese
Maori
Marshallese
Mauritian
Moldovan
Mongolian
Navajo
Norweigan
Oromo
Patois
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Q'eqchi'
Quechua
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Saran Tongo
Serbian
Shona
Sioux
Slovenian
Slovak
Sotho
Spanish
Swedish
Tahitian
Tagalog
Thai
Tongan
Turkish
Twi
Ukranian
Vietnamese
Waray Waray
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Zulu

I don't know about you, but I think that is pretty WONDERFUL! Hugs to all you beautiful mommas who love and sacrifice so much - MWAH!!

Shannon Avery

 Shannon is a wife, a mom, a business and social media consultant,

 a writer, an avid genealogist....and a Missionary Momma!