A Blog for People who are passionate about Languages

How many Languages are there on our planet?

Have you ever asked yourself how many Languages there are in this world? Well, you might be surprised!

There are a number of coherent (but quite different) answers that linguists might give to this apparently simple question. But one thing is for sure:

More than you might think!

When people are asked how many languages they think there are in the world, the answers vary quite a bit. One random sampling of New Yorkers, for instance, resulted in answers like “probably several hundred.” However we choose to count them, though, this is not close. When we look at reference works, we find estimates that have escalated over time. The 1911 (11th) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, implies a figure somewhere around 1,000, a number that climbs steadily over the course of the twentieth century. That is not due to any increase in the number of languages, but rather to our increased understanding of how many languages are actually spoken in areas that had previously been under described. Much pioneering work in documenting the languages of the world has been done by missionary organizations (such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) with an interest in translating the Christian Bible. As of 1997, at least a portion of the Bible had been translated into 2,197 different languages, still a long way short of full coverage. The most extensive catalog of the world’s languages, generally taken to be as authoritative as any, is that of the Ethnologue organization, whose detailed classified list currently includes 6,809 distinct languages.

A family is a group of languages that can be shown to be genetically related to one another. The best known languages are those of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs (we at ASO Terra Lingua teach them all – and many more – see www.asoterralingua.com ). Considering how widely the Indo-European languages are distributed geographically, and their influence in world affairs, one might assume that a good proportion of the world’s languages belong to this family. That is not the case, however: there are about 200 Indo-European languages, but even ignoring the many cases in which a language’s genetic affiliation cannot be clearly determined, there are undoubtedly more families of languages (about 250) than there are members of the Indo-European family.

Languages are not at all uniformly distributed around the world. Just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plant and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages. Out the 6,809, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia. One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the average number of speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.

We do not find linguistic diversity only in out of the way places. Centuries of French governments have striven to make that country linguistically uniform, but (even disregarding Breton, a Celtic language; Allemannisch, the Germanic language spoken in Alsace; and Basque), Ethnologue shows at least ten distinct Romance languages spoken in France, including Picard, Gascon, Provençal, and several others in addition to “French.”

Multilingualism in North America is usually discussed (apart from the status of French in Canada) in terms of English vs. Spanish, or the languages of immigrant populations such as Cantonese or Khmer, but we should remember that the Americas were a region with many languages well before modern Europeans or Asians arrived. In pre-contact times, over 300 languages were spoken in North America. Of these, about half have died out completely. All we know of them comes from early word lists or limited grammatical and textual records. But that still leaves about 165 of North America’s indigenous languages spoken at least to some extent today.

Once we go beyond the major languages of economic and political power, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and a few more with millions of speakers each, everywhere we look in the world we find a vast number of others, belonging to many genetically distinct families. But whatever the degree of that diversity, one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising proportion of the world’s languages are in fact disappearing—even as we speak.