How many languages are there

That makes the average number of. Photo credit: Minna Sundberg. 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. 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 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. 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.

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 indigenous languages, only eight are spoken by as many as 10, 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 years, it is actually close to the norm.

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? 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.

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.

This is not a necessary step, however, for them to become participants in a larger economic or political order. 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. 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. 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 had not changed a bit.

In such cases, population groups may decide to abandon their own language entirely and exclusively teach their children the majority language in order to ensure their social integration. There have been many other examples of genocide and forced assimilation throughout history that have placed minority language speakers in even more oppressive circumstances.

But even if a local language is not regarded as inferior, increased mobility and globalization are contributing toward the disappearance of languages — and by the way, so is climate change. If these two decide to start a family together, chances are high that their children will not grow up with all four languages.

Moreover, maintaining a language is also a question of cost for a nation. Not every country can afford to maintain an entire public apparatus and mass media in two languages, let alone several languages. We only need to think of all the public signs, forms, applications, administrators, police officers, doctors, newspapers, television channels…the list is endless. All of these things would have to be multilingual, or the people concerned would at least have to have extensive knowledge of the other languages.

However, one academic database currently lists extinct languages. A great example of preserving a language can be found in Toulouse in the south of France. As the capital of the region of Occitania, the metro system was set up in two languages: all stops are announced in French and then in Occitan, a Romance language with only about , native speakers left in France. And Occitan often does not sound so different from French, perhaps a bit like a mix of French and Spanish. English is also official in the most countries, with 67 countries naming English their official language.

It is the lingua franca for much of the world, and is the most common single language for conducting business. Although they don't rank as highly in terms of speakers, Arabic, Spanish, French and Russian are all recognized as international languages. In general, European languages tend to be the most represented around the world due to the history of European imperialism.

If you want a more precise breakdown, you should check out our list of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

As mentioned, there are 1, different languages with native speakers in the triple digits. Many of these are indigenous languages that have been gradually lost as English and the Romance languages supplant other local languages.

In terms of the least common, it's a bit hard to pin down. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that the meaning of a word changes based on the way we pronounce it.

With a set of about 50, characters, it is probably one of the most complex languages to learn. Language family: Indo-Ayran, a sub-family of Indo-European. These words and many more! There are about million native Hindi speakers, which makes it the third most spoken language in the world. Language family: Romance, a sub-family of Indo-European. Related to: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian. Fun fact: The first modern novel and the second most translated book after the Bible was written in Spanish.

Which novel? This is great news for native English speakers. For Spanish appears to be the easiest foreign language for English speakers to learn! Fun fact: About 45 per cent of modern English words are of French origin. Spoken across different parts of the world — think everywhere from the rest of France and parts of Canada to a handful of African countries, including Senegal and Madagascar — the French language has spread its roots far and wide.

Language family: Semitic, a sub-family of Afro-Asiatic. Fun fact: Arabic has at least 11 words for love, each of them expressing a different stage in the process of falling in love.