Search results
People also ask
How many languages are there?
What languages are spoken in the world?
Which country has the largest number of languages in the world?
How many languages will there be in the future?
This is a list of the number of languages by country and dependency according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
The World Atlas of Languages is an online tool that documents the status and features of languages around the world. It shows that there are 8324 languages, spoken or signed, according to its methodology, and around 7000 languages are still in use.
- How Languages Form
- Indo-European Languages
- Afro-Asiatic Languages
- Sino-Tibetan Languages
- Niger-Congo Languages
- Most Spoken Languages
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
New languages often develop due to geographic isolation and lack of standardization, which occurs through schooling and educational systems. However, languages also steadily evolve over time and new languages sprout and blossom from neighboring languages as well as previous iterations. For example, Old English is almost incomprehensible compared to...
One of the largest language families, Indo-European accounts for the first language of over 3 billion people on Earth. The list is substantial, but it includes the Romance languages (Spanish, French, and Italian), the Germanic languages (English, Yiddish, German, Norwegian), Latin, languages from Anatolia, and languages from India (Sanskrit, and th...
A force to be reckoned with, the Afro-Asiatic family has influenced the native tongue of roughly half a billion people. Arabic and its associated neighboring languages make up 2/3 of that group, and the locations are typically found in the Middle East and North Africa. However, historical linguists struggle to identify the exact location where the ...
Over 400 languages can be traced back to Sino-Tibetan, with Chinese languages accounting for the majority of the 1.4 billion current speakers. Once again, the origin of these languages is hotly debated, but it is widely believed that it began with a group of north Chinese farmers in 5250 BCE. Old Chinese is naturally the oldest written form of Sino...
Over 600 million people currently speak a language that is descended from the Niger-Congo family. The regions involved are found between Senegal and Ghana, then central Africa towards Kenya and Angola and Mozambique, and all the way south to South Africa. Even Sudanhas a small pocket of speakers. Although they do not account for the most current sp...
English takes first place with one and a half billion speakers, which is understandable given its accessibility and use in business. Mandarin Chinese is second, with just over a billion speakers. Hindi and Spanish are used by 602 million and 548 million people, respectively, and French comes in fifth with over 275 million speakers. Other noteworthy...
Learn about the history, formation, and diversity of languages in the world. According to Ethnologue, there are 7,151 recognized languages, but only 142 language families with a common ancestor.
- Cory Price
Learn about the diversity, distribution and history of languages around the world. Find out how many languages are spoken on each continent, which ones are the most widely spoken and which ones are endangered.
- Europe. 1.1 Indo-European. Most of Europe’s languages belong to the Indo-European family, which has the following branches: Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, and Tocharian.
- Africa. Africa’s extraordinary linguistic diversity is threatened by the possible extinction of half or more of its languages, which some predict by the end of the century due to competition from other languages.
- Asia. Asia is home to 60% of the world’s population and nearly 30% of the world’s languages. These are grouped into just a handful of major families, leaving out several important isolates, and due to long periods of contact, there’s less diversity than one might expect.
- Oceania. Oceania, which includes Australia and most of the island territories of the central and southern Pacific and Indian oceans, is home to the Austronesian family and to two very large language groups, the Australian and the Papuan groups.
Ecuador Spanish (Castilian; official) 98.6%, indigenous 3.9% (Quechua 3.2%, other indigenous 0.7%), foreign 2.8%, other 0.6% (includes Ecuadorian sign language); note - (Quechua and Shuar are official languages of intercultural relations; other indigenous languages are in official use by indigenous peoples in the areas they inhabit) (2022 est.) major-language sample(s): La Libreta Informativa ...
Explore the global linguistic diversity by browsing the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages, which documents around 8324 languages, spoken or signed, by governments, public institutions and academic communities. Learn about the languages, their status, and their distribution by country.
