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.
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 close behind. 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. Quiz writers exploit this constantly, so listen carefully to which version they asked.
Papua New Guinea
One country, with a population smaller than many cities, is home to more than 800 languages — over a tenth of all the languages on Earth. Mountainous terrain kept communities separated for a very long time, and language diversity is what happens when people are not talking to each other.
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 will be gone within 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.
Odds and ends worth banking
- The Bible is the most translated book in the world.
- Khmer has the longest alphabet of any language — around 74 letters.
- Esperanto was invented deliberately, in the 1880s, by L. L. Zamenhof, who hoped a neutral language might reduce conflict. It did not, but people still speak it.
- Egyptian hieroglyphs were unreadable for centuries until the Rosetta Stone — the same text in three scripts — gave scholars the key.
- English has borrowed so heavily from French and Latin that a large part of its vocabulary is not, in origin, English at all.