Sources of information on this page

How many languages are spoken in the world?
Ethnologue lists 6,912 living languages in the world today. Keep in mind, however, that the number of languages may never be determined exactly. Languages are not always easily treated as discrete entities with clearly defined boundaries because they represent a continua of features extending across geographic, political and social boundaries. Not all scholars agree on the criteria that clearly distinguish "language" from "dialect". At the same time, estimates of how many people speak a given language can vary considerably. Some surveys include only first language (native) speakers, others include both first and second language speakers (i.e., those who use the language in daily life but are not native speakers of it).

As a result of such indeterminacy, some mutually intelligible varieties such as German and Dutch are considered to be separate languages because they are spoken in different countries (political considerations), while mutually unintelligible Mandarin and Cantonese are considered to be varieties of Chinese because they are spoken in one country, share a common writing system of great antiquity, and are perceived to be one language by speakers of distinct varieties (historical, political and social considerations). In addition, some languages are poorly studied. As a result, it has not been possible to establish whether they are separate languages or dialects of other languages.

Click here on the Ethnologue Language Map on which each dot represents a living language.

Breakdown of languages by world area
It was mentioned earlier that Ethnologue lists 6,912 living languages. The table below reveals a striking difference between the median and the mean sizes of languages in different parts of the world.

• Africa
  Africa has the second largest number of languages after Asia but it accounts for only 11.8 % of all language speakers in the world.
• Americas
  The Americas are rich in languages with small numbers of speakers.
• Asia
  Asia has the largest number of languages and the largest number of speakers, accounting for 61% of all language speakers in the world. There is a striking difference between median and mean number of speakers.
• Europe
  Europe has the smallest number of languages and the second-largest number of speakers after Asia, accounting for 26.4% of all language speakers in the world. Unlike Asia, the majority of Europe's languages have a substantial number of speakers. As a result, Europe has the largest median and mean of all world areas.
• Pacific
  The Pacific accounts for 0.1% of all language speakers in the world and has the lowest median number of speakers of all world areas.

The most spoken Languages of the world
The table below lists 30 languages spoken by close to 5 billion, or by approximately 77% of the current world population of 6,5 billion people. Keep in mind that these numbers are sometimes based on old census data, and in some cases, there is no reliable census data for certain languages. The information about the number of second-language speakers is often extremely difficult to establish exactly, so the breakdown between the number of 1st and 2nd language speakers is not always possible.

Countries with the greatest number of languages
Most countries in the world have more than one spoken language. With 311 languages, the United States is the fifth most linguistically diverse country in the world. Its diversity comes from both indigenous and immigrant sources: the 311 languages spoken in the United States are divided between 162 indigenous and 149 immigrant languages. On the other hand, Papua New Guinea's 820 languages are all indigenous.

The table below lists countries with over 50 different languages. Click on the name of the country to get a listing of the languages spoken in it.

A diversity index, or the ratio between the number of languages and the population of a country, places Papua New Guinea (820 languages spoken by 5.4 million people) in first place, followed by Vanuatu (115 languages spoken by 120,000 people) in second place.

Click here to find out more about the number of languages spoken in all the countries of the world.

Human voices in cosmic space
25 years after their 1977 launch, the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are twice as distant from Earth as Pluto, and speeding outward into interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network.

Voyager carries a message on a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk, that contains sounds and images portraying the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. They assembled images, a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth in fifty-five languages including several dead ones. Instructions use symbolic language to describe the origin of the spacecraft and to explain how the record is to be played.

It will be forty thousand years before the Voyager approaches another planetary system. As Carl Sagan had noted, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Click here to listen to greetings in fifty-five languages.
Click on the language to learn about it.