How many languages are there in world?

Answer 1

It is hard to find how many languages in the world exactly but the invaluable Ethnologue quotes 6909 living languages, that's one language for every 862,000 people on Earth. Let's look at some more figures from Ethnologue's database.

Europe, with ¼ of the World's population has only 234 languages spoken on a daily basis.

Although English does well as the World's business language-at least for the time being- it is only 3rd in the league table of native speakers of a first language, with 328M, only 1m behind Spanish but a long way from the 845M Mandarin speakers.

94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the World's population, which tells us that there are hundreds of languages with just a few thousand [or hundred] speakers.

Many of these languages would be classified by some as dialects i.e. languages that have evolved from but are still quite closely related to another. This definition, of course, falls down very rapidly as most Western European languages can trace their roots to Latin but would not normally be described as dialects. Some of the African and Caribbean Patois are still seen as dialects, as was Ulster-Scots until fairly recently when it was recognised as a language. People consider top ten languages in the world which are Mandarin, the leading languages that covers 1 billion speakers all over the world. The second one is English, considered as the universal language, then next are Hindustani,Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian and lasted to French.

Answer 2

There are approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world. However, many of these languages are endangered and are at risk of extinction.