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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.
How many languages are there in the world? There are about 7000 spoken languages in the world and about 300 writing systems. Which language is the number 1 worldwide? According to various sources, English is the most widely spoken language in the world, with around 1.35 billion speakers (first and second language (L1 and L2)).
Below is a list of the 25 languages with the highest number of total speakers, according to data from the Ethnologue language catalog in the early 2020s. For a list of languages that counts only the number of native speakers, see languages by number of native speakers. English (1,456,448,320)
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 ...
There are currently around 6,500 languages in the world. The country with the most languages and dialects is probably Papua New Guinea, a country on the border between Asia and Australia with historically numerous trade relations in large parts of Asia, Australia and Oceania. There are said to be over 800 individual languages there.
The World Report of Languages presents the outcomes of work carried out by UNESCO since 2016 working in cooperation with the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages scientific group, which includes a number of the world’s leading scholars in the subject area.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a comprehensive reference work that provides information and statistics for all of the world’s known living languages. Since 1951, Ethnologue has been an active research project involving hundreds of linguists and other researchers around the world.
