How Many Languages Are There? Not the Number You Think

Ask most people how many languages exist and they guess a few hundred. The real figure is somewhere around 7,000, and it is falling. Language is one of the richest — and most often misunderstood — areas of general knowledge.

Speakers, and the Trick in the Question

Which language has the most speakers? It depends entirely on how you ask.

By native speakers, Mandarin Chinese wins comfortably, with Spanish second. By total speakers — including everyone who learned it as a second language — English pulls ahead, because so much of the world learns it in school and at work. Hindi, Arabic and French are also among the most widely spoken. Quiz writers exploit this constantly, so listen carefully to which version they asked.

Papua New Guinea

One country, with a population far smaller than that of its giant neighbour Indonesia, is home to more than 800 languages — over a tenth of all the languages on Earth. Mountainous terrain and dense forests kept communities separated for a very long time, and language diversity is what happens when people are not talking to each other.

Papua New Guinea is also home to Rotokas, which has one of the smallest alphabets in the world, with just 12 letters. At the other end of the scale, Khmer, the language of Cambodia, has the longest alphabet, with around 74 letters.

The Disappearing Half

A large share of those 7,000 languages have only a handful of elderly speakers left. Estimates vary, but linguists generally reckon a language dies somewhere in the world every few weeks, and that a substantial fraction of the total could be gone by the end of this century.

When a language goes, what goes with it is not just vocabulary. It is the only record of how a particular group of people organised the world — their plants, their kinship, their weather, their sense of what is worth having a word for.

Languages can come back, though. Hebrew was used mainly for religious and written purposes for centuries before it was revived as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Today it has millions of native speakers.

Writing Systems

• Egyptian hieroglyphs were unreadable for centuries until the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, gave scholars the key. It carries the same text in hieroglyphs, Demotic script and ancient Greek. Jean-François Champollion announced his breakthrough in 1822.
• Korean Hangul was invented deliberately in the 15th century under King Sejong, to replace complex Chinese characters with an alphabet ordinary people could learn quickly. Korea celebrates it with a national holiday.
• The Hawaiian alphabet has just 13 letters: five vowels and eight consonants.

Unusual Languages

• Basque, spoken in northern Spain and southwest France, is a "language isolate" — it is not related to any other living language.
• Silbo Gomero is a whistled language used on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, able to carry messages across deep valleys. UNESCO lists it as part of humanity's cultural heritage.
• Mandarin is a tonal language. The same syllable can mean completely different things depending on whether the pitch is flat, rising, dipping or falling.
• Sign languages are full languages, with their own grammar. There are hundreds of them, and British and American Sign Language are not mutually intelligible.

Countries With Many Official Languages

India recognises 22 languages in its constitution, and its banknotes carry text in more than a dozen of them. South Africa has 12 official languages, including South African Sign Language. Switzerland has four: German, French, Italian and Romansh.

Odds and Ends Worth Banking

• The Bible is the most translated book in the world.
• Esperanto was invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, who hoped a neutral language might reduce conflict. It did not, but people still speak it.
• English has borrowed so heavily from French and Latin that a large part of its vocabulary is not, in origin, English at all.

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