However, Professor Yaron Matras claims the number "significantly under-represented both languages spoken and the numbers who speak them".

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The people have spoken and in increasing numbers are expressing impatience with austerity.

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Amazon Mechanical Turk used to be a popular one, but now a number of independent sites are around, such as Death by CAPTCHA. Clever hacks have even been developed for audio CAPTCHAs that merely deconstruct waveform shapes to identify what numbers are being spoken.

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It doesn't, however, call up conventional web pages, but content which is specially composed for a telephone: sound clips, numbers, music, spoken texts.

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Only Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and English the world's most widely spoken second language have the sheer numbers of speakers to make it probable that they will survive for at least the next 300 years.

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But listening to the audio CAPTCHA again just a few seconds later, numbers began to emerge from the noisy mess, spoken by a mix of high and low voices.

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