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How Many Languages Are Spoken Across the World

July 25, 2023
3 Min Read

There are a lot of languages in the world. We might not even know about some. While a few are very popular, many languages are close to extinction. In this article, you not only learn how many languages are registered but also discover more about language families and the distribution of languages across the globe.

How Many Languages Exist?

Replying to this question can be tricky. However, the most accurate source, Ethnologue, which is considered the most extensive catalog of languages in the world,  shows that in 2023 we know about the existence of 7,117 languages. Unfortunately, the number of languages in use is shrinking almost every month.

The Most Common Languages

The first and most common language is English, the second Mandarin, and the third Hindi. Spanish takes fourth place and French fifth. The 6th most spoken language is Arabic, which has many dialects.

It is good to remember that 90% of the 7,117 languages are spoken by less than 100,000 people!

Family of Languages

A family is a group of languages that are related to each other. Some of the most known languages, including English, belong to the Indo-European family. Even though Indo-European languages are spread widely around the world, there are only around 200 of them.

Aside from that, there are about 250 language families in the world. So there are more families of languages than there are languages in the Indo-European family.

Distribution of Languages Across the Globe

Languages are distributed unevenly across the globe. Some places are very diverse when it comes to spoken languages, and some are very unified. In Europe, only 230 languages are spoken, while in Asia, there are 2,197 languages used every day.

Papua-New Guinea has a population of 3.9 million, but it has the highest linguistic diversity in the world, with around 832 languages spoken. If you do the math and divide 3.9 million by 832 languages, we get an average of 4,500 users of each language. Additionally, those languages are not always similar – they belong to 40-50 different families. What diversity!

Declines in the Number of Languages

Unfortunately, the language diversity is getting smaller each month. Many local languages die because of the progress of the most popular languages in the world. The most endangered are languages that are not learned by children of a particular population because they die off together with current native speakers.

This situation is typical in North America. There are about 165 indigenous languages, but only eight are spoken by around 10,000 people. About 75 of those languages are known only by a few older people, so most likely, they will be gone soon.

In Europe, there are also languages close to extinction, including Cappadocian Greek, Cornish, Hertein, Karaim, and many more.

When a language dies, a part or all of the culture and customs connected to this language disappear as well. This is why taking care of these languages and preserving them is so important.

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