HOW MANY LANGUAGES ARE THERE IN THE WORLD?

It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just a single speaker!

 

Languages are grouped into families that share a common ancestry. For example, English is related to German and Dutch, and they are all part of the Indo-European family of languages. These also include Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin. 2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has a mere 260.

 

Interesting Facts about Languages

Here you will find some really interesting facts about languages.

• The population of Europe is about ¼ of the whole world, but Europeans speak only 234 languages.
• About 94% of all languages are regularly spoken by just 6% of the population of the world.
• Most languages are constantly used by less than one thousand native speakers.
• K. David Harrison, a linguist from the Swarthmore College, predicts that by 2050 about 90% of spoken languages will be dead.
• In Papua New Guinea there are less than 5.5 million citizens and about 830 languages spoken by them.
• The United Nation has six official languages, used in meetings: Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Spanish, and Russian.
• Esperanto is the most popular artificial language.
• The number of speakers of English in China is larger than in the USA.