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How Many Languages Are There in the World?


Linguistic Society of America, 2010

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 of
Ethnologue’s 6,909, 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 (and
we discuss below the problem of how to quantify it),
one thing that is fairly certain is that a surprising
proportion of the world’s languages are in fact
disappearing—even as
we speak.

Fewer than there were last month.

Whatever the world’s linguistic diversity at the present,
it is steadily declining, as local forms of speech
increasingly become moribund before the advance of
the major languages of world civilization. When a
language ceases to be learned by young children, its
days are clearly numbered, and we can predict with
near certainty that it will not survive the death of the
current native speakers.

The situation in North America is typical. Of about 165
indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by as many
as 10,000 people. About 75 are spoken only by a
handful of older people, and can be assumed
to be on
their way to extinction. While we might think this is an
unusual fact about North America, due to the
overwhelming pressure of European settlement over
the past 500 years, it is actually close to the norm.
Around a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer
than a
thousand remaining speakers, and linguists
generally agree in estimating that the extinction within
the next century of at least 3,000 of the 6,909 languages
listed by Ethnologue, or nearly half, is virtually
guaranteed under present circumstances. The threat of
extinction thus affects a vastly greater proportion of the
world’s languages
than its biological species.

Some would say that the death of a language is much
less worrisome than that of a species. After all, are
there not instances of languages that died and were
reborn, like Hebrew? And in any case, when a group
abandons its native language, it is
generally for another
that is more economically advantageous to them: why
should we question the wisdom of that choice?

How Many Languages Are There in the World?


Linguistic Society of America, 2010

But the case of Hebrew is quite misleading, since the
language was not in fact abandoned over the many
years when it was no longer the principal language of
the Jewish people. During this time, it remained an
object of intense study and analysis by scholars. And
there are few if
any comparable cases to support the
notion that language death is reversible.

The economic argument does not really supply a reason
for speakers of a “small” and perhaps unwritten
language to abandon that language simply because they
also need to learn a widely used language such as
English or Mandarin
Chinese. Where there is no one
dominant local language, and groups with diverse
linguistic heritages come into regular contact with one
another, multilingualism is a perfectly natural condition.
When a language dies, a world dies with it, in the sense
that a community’s connection with its past, its
traditions and
its base of specific knowledge are all
typically lost as the vehicle linking people to that
knowledge is abandoned. This is not a necessary step,
however, for them to become participants in a larger
economic or political order.

For further information about the issues involved in
language endangerment, see the LSA’s
FAQ “What is an
endangered language?”

Count the flags!

To this point, we have assumed that we know how to
count the world’s languages. It might seem that any
remaining imprecision is similar to what we might find
in any other census‐like operation: perhaps some of the
languages were not home when the Ethnologue counter
came calling, or
perhaps some of them have similar
names that make it hard to know when we are dealing
with one language and when with several; but these are
problems that could be solved in principle, and the
fuzziness of our numbers should thus be quite small.
But in fact, what makes languages
distinct from one
another turns out to be much more a social and political
issue than a linguistic one, and most of the cited
numbers are matters of opinion rather than science.
The late Max Weinreich used to say that “A language is
a dialect with an army and a
navy.” He was talking
about the status of Yiddish, long considered a “dialect”
because it was not identified with any politically
significant entity. The distinction is still often implicit in
talk about European “languages” vs. African “dialects.”
What counts as a language rather than a “mere” dialect
typically involves issues of
statehood, economics,
literary traditions and writing systems, and other
trappings of power, authority and culture — with purely
linguistic considerations playing a less significant role.

For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese,
Hakka, Shanghainese, etc. are just as different from one
another (and from the dominant Mandarin) as Romance
languages
such as French, Spanish, Italian and
Romanian. They are not mutually intelligible, but their
status derives from their association with a single nation
and a shared writing system, as well as from explicit
government policy. In contrast, Hindi and Urdu are
essentially the same system (referred to in earlier times
as “Hindustani”), but associated with different countries
(India and Pakistan), different writing systems, and
different religious orientations. Although varieties in
use in India and Pakistan by well‐educated speakers are
somewhat more distinct than the local vernaculars, the
differences are still minimal—far less significant than
those separating Mandarin from Cantonese, for

example. For an extreme example of this phenomenon,
consider the language formerly known as Serbo‐
Croatian, spoken over much of the territory of the
former Yugoslavia and generally considered a single
language with different local dialects and writing
systems. Within this territory, Serbs (who are largely
Orthodox) use a Cyrillic
alphabet, while Croats (largely
Roman Catholic) use the Latin alphabet. Within a period
of only a few years after the breakup of Yugoslavia as a
political entity, at least three new languages (Serbian,
Croatian and Bosnian) had emerged, although the
actual linguistic facts h