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According to the World Atlas of Languages’ methodology, there are 8324 languages, spoken or signed, documented by the governments, public institutions and academic communities; out of 8324, around 7000 languages are still in use.
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?
Over 88% of people speak one of these languages as their native tongue, and many hundreds of millions more speak them as second languages. This ranking accounts for both, showing the total usage worldwide.
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.
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.
This entry provides a listing of languages spoken in each country and specifies any that are official national or regional languages. When data is available, the languages spoken in each country are broken down according to the percent of the total population speaking each language as a first language, unless otherwise noted.
About 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today. The actual number depends on where the line is drawn between language and dialect—an arbitrary decision, because languages are always in flux.
